Google busting folks hiding via CSS

hmmm well it appears to me that google has chosen someone within google to be a kind of link to the outsider eg se web designer developer that person is matt cutts, its similar in other fields but he is perceived by normal people as a saviour who has inside info, but he only comments on what google ants you to know similar with Majornelson.com in relation to xbox.com

 

No kidding... would you really expect him to reveal all Google's secrets to the shark-infested world of webmasters looking for any opportunity to exploit and spam the search engines?

The point is that he may not tell us a lot but at least what he does tell us is credible, unlike what you can read on most forums, which is 99% hysteria, myth, and rumor, and at least 98% just plain wrong.

 

oh ok your intelligent to recognise that, 90 per cent of people don't think outside the box, therefore wouldn't realise that and think hes just good at predicting, of course forums post BS but it works they get traffic through it. Look how many times people jump on pr update posts.

 

Exactly minstrel and that’s why I take most of this with a pinch of salt until I hear directly from the horses mouth, like Matt Cutts (not that I am calling Google a horse and Matt a mouth, lol).

 

That's exactly my point. Those who go nuts over PR update threads should read and then carefully re-read Matt Cutts: What's an update?.

 

Indeed they should, but they won't plus this times update has defied all updates before it.

 

What do you mean?

 

Not to go back on topic here, but I'm concerned that this will lead to penalizing sites which place special text on pages for printing but not on-screen display.

For instance, you may want your website pages to always print with the company name and address/phone at the top, so place that text within a div id that is technically hidden to browsers and only appears when the page is printed.

This is a very valid use of hidden text, but from the little actual information provided by Matt there's no way to know whether or not it would get your dropped.

More valid examples for items only 'displayed' for handheld devices, speech-based browsers, braille-based tactile devices, etc. can easily be made as well.

Other's thoughts?

 

In most cases hidden text will simply be filtered out and you won't be able to use the hidden text to help you rank for your search terms.

If google spots the hidden text is stuffed with keywords then you are risking a ban.

 

Hi Disgust, I'm assuming Google can't automatically know what colour an image is because all it will see is a file. How can Google know that image1.jpg is a photo of my aunt and image2.jpg is a blue square? I'm no computer scientist so I have no authority on this but your comments certainly grabbed my interest. Can you elaborate?

It would be pretty cool if they could do this - their image search would be a heck of a lot better Also their would be all sorts of interesting developments for SEO like being able to use text in embedded images.

 

Computers can recognise text in images and even recognise faces, you can bet that if other people can do it then the hundreds of phd's at google can do it.

Google could take a screenshot of a website and read the text from it and compare this to the text in the source code to see if you use hidden text. I'm not saying the do this, but they could.

 

the G spiders only obeys the robots files because they choose to. Thus, you can easily tell it to ignore the robots.txt file if you want to look at a certain "blocked" file (such as the css file)

 

If that happens then whats the purpose of robots.txt?

If Gbot do it then I think the rest SE bots will follow

 

The purpose is still to block the robots from accessing certain parts of your site, eg if you don't want your images to be indexed (due to bandwidth consumption) then you block the images directory, or if you want certain things (such as an admin area) to remain hidden. It's also handy if you want to have the site deindexed completely (look at WMW for example). Sure, it gets abused, but that's why it's up to the programmer of the spider to choose if they will obey the robots file...

 

The purpose of the robots.txt file is NOT to prevent spiders or anyone else from seeing a file (and obviously it doesn't do that since it's voluntary).

The purpose is to identify certain files or folders that you do not want indexed. Googlebot may well crawl CSS files and folders. As long as the identified files are not indexed, Google is living up to it's part of the bargain.

If you truly want something to be private, password protect it.