Display issues for repetative keywords display non CSS?

Hi,

I have got an issue with a website that is really bugging me. My site is a car rental site and I have seperate listing pages for each location, so a page for "car rental in New York", one for "car rental in Pittsburgh" etc etc.

Now I know that for the best SERP's I should be linking those pages up with the exact keywords I am targetting i.e "car rental in New York" etc, however the problem with this is that when I am listing locations etc it makes the list look really ugly/spammy to have "car rental in" in every single link - it is also not intuitive for the average user as they are trying to quickly scan for there location and the "car rental in" just clutters their vision.

So what do I do as a solution to keep both the user happy and the search engines??

Has anyone got a novel way of overcoming this sort of situation? - I was considering using a CSS of display: none, like this: <a href="/car-rental/new-york/"><span class="displaynonecss">Car Rental in</span> New York</a>. I believe this is legitimate as the full anchor is not needed for the average user, but for visually impared using a text reader the full anchor is useful - however I am still concerned SE's will not see it that way.

Any thoughts will be of help.

Cheers

 

If I understand you correctly, you want to use css to hide a portion of the text? Google claims it can now detect text hidden with css, which can get you a 30 day penalty that lasts for 30 days from when the bot detects it has been removed.

 

if your page is obviously for car rental maybe try:

<a href="/car-rental/new-york/" title="car rental">New York</a>

if this is part of a navigation list within an unorderd <ul> list then you could have a header 'Car Rental Locations:' followed by each list item <li> with the above achor for each location.

difficult to give help without knowing the context of the link?

avoid hidden text and dont forget the end user - its not all about SE's

 

Hidden text is fine. Period... you have to use it sometimes, and it will not get you banned. Believe what you will, but I've got a ton, ton of sites that have hidden text.

 

If google detects hidden text, you will get a penalty, NOT banned. I know this for a fact - and has beens stated by Matt Cutts from google.

You just won't rank well for any competitive term during this time. How many sites do you have with hidden text that rank in the top 15 for a competitive term? I'll bet zero.

Although no system is perfect, and some sites do slip through, it isn't something anyone should do who wants to rank well for the long term.