Hidden text

If a site has lots of hidden text, how does that harm them? Do seach engines penalize them and do they always find the hidden text?

*On a side note, I don't use that tactic and am not planning on using it, I was just wondering the affects of it since I come across it quite often.

 

Actually, I don´t know.
It could ban you, or not, it depends...

It could also prove your stability being one of the authoritative sites...

 

Yeah even though Google frowns on it there are plenty sites in their index that do it.

 

If you wanna go Black Hat sure...but for building a long term reputable and trusted site, I wouldn't

 

Ah, yeah! They will definitely ban you if you are reported.

And if there's no cops around you can get away with driving drunk, but tell that to the mother who's kid you run over.

 

If you choose to use hidden text I suggest making the text color hidden w/ an external style sheet and not the font color tag as the latter can be picked up by googlebot.

 

It doesn't necessarily harm them. Think about pages that use css dropdown menus that use display:none. They're not spamming the search engines, and they don't get banned.

It's your intent that matters. If you're using hidden text to load your page with keywords then that's a different story.

 

It's generally known as bad ...
but in my experience it sometime helps because if you put real content as hidden text then it will help you.
actual problem is with keyword stuffing not hidden texts. (that's what i feel).

 

Right from Google's guidelines:

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

IMO G penalize heavily for this

 

Two ways you could look at this are:

1) Does it make sense to penalise hidden text/links
2) Is there any evidence that shows hidden text/links don't get penalised

Answers (IMHO):
1) No. It makes sense to penalise spam but not all hidden links are spam. CSS dropdown menus, skip navigation to help screen readers, show/hide buttons to help users organise the page are all examples of hidden text/links that are not aimed at deceiving search engines.

2) No. But there are plenty of examples of pages that use css dropdown menus with display:none that are not penalised.

So to summarise, it doesn't make sense to me to penalise hidden text/links (unless it's spam) and I've seen no evidence of hidden text/links (that aren't spam) being penalised.

 

I've seen many merchant account provider sites that rank well simply because they have hidden text.

 

Hidden text is a deceptive SEO method and you will surely get banned

 

I used this tactic once on a new site, it got ranked quite highly intially but then got dropped by Google for a good length of time. Finally removed the hidden text and it took another 6 months to get re-ranked.

 

Yes Google will ban you for using hidden text.

 

Why is the kid walking in the street in the first place?

 

That is absolutely ridiculous advice. Hide it how you will, it's still all wrong.

Amen to that.

He wasn't. The DUI guy lost control and went up onto the footpath. There were still no cops around so he thought he'd get away with it.

 

Google doesn't like hidden stuff.
http://news.inq7.net/infotech/index.php?index=1&story_id=67093

 

It wasn't about morality, rather technicality

 

serach engine will penalize you and will down you in rankings

 

i m sure that SE can find that hidden text.Coz for us it is hidden when it write in white font on white background but for crawler it is same as another text.