Justa quick question. I ve been asked some advice regarding possible "black hat" methods. The owner of the site had someone do some SEO on it and as far as I can see the person responsable for the work has added a whole bunch of text which is rich in keywords but these keywords only appear in the flash file. The whole site seems to be in flash. Would google penalize a site for hiding keywords?. As far as I can see, these keywords dont appear anywhere on the page NOR the flashfile. Any help ? oooops...forgot the URL: The site involved is a site similar to mine but in German. If you check the HTMl code you ll see the text has been added which is not visual obn the page itself http://www.ohrensausen.de
They will only get a penalty if google finds the hidden keywords. The most likely outcome is that the site will rank very badly until you get rid of all the flash.
Thanx guys for the help. Strange thind is that the guy who created the site seems to know what he is doing. Hes states that the hidden text he created is 100 % legit: "<!-- text used in the movie-->". Aftert this...hundreds of keywords have been inserted. The only problem ist that they can only be found in the code and not on the site. In fact, they dont even match the text used in the flash. The funny thing is that the site owner doesnt know who to believe. Me ( an I insist that the keywordas are hidden ) or the website owner ( insists they arent hidden because the words are in the movie ). I ve advised the owner of the site to write some articles and write the site in HTML and update the articles once a week to keep fresh keyword rich content on the site. Im not sure how google feels about sites that dont update content ona regular basis.
Google is constantly evolving to catch these kinds of techniques because they don't want their product watered down with these kinds of techniques. If it isn't caught now, chances are it will in the future
Generally Google is too clever to fall for old-fashioned hidden keyword baloney. This is late 90's tactics and won't work nowadays.
it would be better if you could just search it out a bit and ask the website owner to clear his doubts by simply reading more articles on it