Is this CSS technique conciders as spam by SE? I place that right before the <table> tag <h1>YOUR HEADER HERE</h1> In css file: h1 {display: none;} And what do you think about Image replacement technique? http://www.mezzoblue.com/tests/revised-image-replacement/ Thanks
You should only use one h1 tag on the page, and Matt Cutt's from google says they have the ability to detect hidden text. You will get a penalty if google discovers it. Controlling the size of the h1 tag will css is fine, but not hidden text.
if you are doing this only for testing purpose then i would suggest you to do this on a spare site and not on your main one, better stay from blackhat alltogether if possible if you want to stay in business for long.
It's been a while since I used any log-based stats, but I've never seen a spider download a CSS file - can someone confirm that they do now?
Yes, they do download the CSS files, I am not sure of the frequency though. There was also a thread a while back there many were saying that google was downloading remotely referenced CSS files.
Hmm.. Why even try it? It's purpose less. Just change the size and font and it's format to make it stylish and actually make a good use out of it. Try to not use blackhat SEO EVER.
Since Google bot doesn't see CSS, it'll read the text fine. But Matt Cutts said that you shouldn't show the user something different to the Google Bot.
That and if your competition ever found out about it you could easily be reported... Which if a site is ranked higher than mine, one of the first things I do is look at their code to see what the major differences are.
They don't need to read the css file to see if the text is a different color than the background. Google has a way of detecting "visibility:hidden" text and text that is the same color as the background color. I have personal experience with it. About a year ago, I went to a javascript drop down menu on a site I have had since 1998. Since the bot wasn't reading the javascript, the program inserted the urls for the menu in the code with a class for a hidden tag inside the css dropdown file. My #1 rankings went out of the top 1000. After trading emails with google, they told me the hidden text had given me a penalty. They understood the reason for the links and why it wasn't black hat, but they told me I had to change it or their bot was going to keep picking it up. I had to put a in a link filled footer to get around it and 30 days later (to the day) my rankings returned. I have since gone to a 100% css dropdown menu where the links are in <li> tags so I was able to remove the footer (which looked real spammy). Google doesn't catch every instance of hidden text, but I certainly wouldn't want to risk it again. It was a mistake that cost me thousands of dollars.
Yep... doing anything that may make your eyebrows get streched...(Matt Cutts LOL)... will certainly make search engines too....