Here's an example of hidden text which I raised with the site owner and he contests that it's not spam, and I'm happy to be proven wrong. When you visit http://www.nddb.net/ and view the source at the top of the page you saw <div class="hide"><a href="#content" title="Find a Family Doctor" accesskey="2">Find a Doctor for your family by name and location in our database, or rate your own family doctor and help others find a good doctor that is right for them and their family.</a>.</div> Code (markup): which has since been removed. Apparantly the template he's using came with it as standard. If all it did was generate the access key that would be fine,perhaps, but it's loaded with keywords and phrases. So who agrees?
Thanks. Do you define what the ID means in the CSS then? OT: In that case, the abundance of hidden text is spam IMO.
If you mean is it spam for SE's, I'd say probably. I don't think intent is part of the equation. If you mean is it spammy for users since its hidden, probably not, since it does serve some purpose.
Sarahk, Heh, you are so formal in your posts. At any rate, I think I agree with you, because in the original, it is only : div class="hide"><a href="#content" title="Skip navigation." accesskey="2">Skip navigation</a>.</div> Code (markup): Which really is useful. Stuffing it with keywords is bad, but it really sucks when the description of your page in google is "Skip navigation". Heh, so that is why I put a sentence full of keywords in it. But I can see what you're saying, it may qualify as "cloaking" (?? not sure if im using that term right) but a different page for the SE than the user. At any rate, if it's a danger, than the SE's may pick up on it one day and penalize me, so better I remove it I suppose. Thanks!
Replies to people I know get a little less formal but when you've got a point to make you don't want to offend anyone and take away from the original message. Now if you'd like a less formal summation (howzat for formal!!! )...
(Chris presses ALT-1) Agh! Where's DP gone... oh, I'm over in the first tab. That's cool. Oh, and DP is now on the main page. I've got a "sent DP to the front page and switch to email" key! I'll shut up now. That'll learn me for using Firefox... Cheers Chris
IMHO if there is text that a consumer cant see on your site and it helps you to manipulate the serps, then yes I would consider that spam..IMHO. I run into a real estate competitor of mine who has the same thing. There was a ton of hidden text on their real estate site.
sarahk, Let me ask you another question. I've got a lot of pages, which I consider legitimate pages, that I'd like to be indexed. The more names I have indexed, the easier it is for people to find them. But google sees them as duplicate content, I'm almost positive, as they have no cache, or are in the "supplemental" index. So, I randomized a lot of stuff on the page, title tags, meta tags, different portions of text, different portions of sentences, a lot of links. This seems to help, as they seem to get indexed. Is this considered spamming? The problem is, the layout for a lot of my pages is exactly the same, around 5000 pages all using the same template. It seems pretty harmless to me, but I figured the div tag was as well, since I wanted the first text on the page (which the SEs seem to use at times) to be right, but hiding it from the users is bad I see. But what about randomized text on the page?
If the search engine sees what the human sees it's not cloaking but when pages are built with a search engine in mind more than a human then you need to be careful. Questions: Do you have stop words at the top of your page, or css or javascript? is the unique content preceded by more than 12k of text? are the pages more than 3 steps away? Do you use a google sitemap? or even a regular sitemap? Do you want to give examples (PM is fine) of some of these pages? Sarah
Thanks for the pm. Now the page it really doesn't like misc/add_review?id=2594 http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html so you might want to rewrite that to misc/add_review?dr=2594 The page it likes a bit more node/view/13/2594 I'd change (Search the WebMD doctor database for this doctor) so that "this doctor" is the name of the actual dr Use the css so that <td><b>No Rating.</b><br /></td> doesn't use <b> but perhaps <td class='b'>No Rating.</td> so that the words No Rating aren't seen to be important by the SEs However leave it using <b> for the location and specialty. Although these should be links so you can go to a page where similar doctors are listed. Finally get the javascript off the page Change the meta description and keywords to be appropriate to this page. They don't appear to change. Sarah
it seems to be including the add_review pages, I could mod_rewrite them perhaps to more like misc/add_review/####. (http://www.google.com/search?q=site:nddb.net+add_review&num=100&hl=en&lr=&filter=0) One thing I'm worried about, if I mod_rewrite it, and i leave the old urls there, then will it get me for duplicate content? Should I do some sort of redirection from the old url to the new url? Also, I do use a sitemap /sitemap.txt not XML though, just a list of all the pages from the DB. And I can take the bold out and change the meta tags, that's not a big deal, think i should put the location and name in the meta tags? You think the JS is a problem? Heh, I just put that in... doh