Why has Google not grasped hidden text... This site internationalrentals.com has hidden text on every single page, and not just a few words.. lines and lines of the stuff! You would of thought Google could filter this crap out by now! Darren
That amount of hidden text is just outrageous. You'd think G could see that the font color and body are both set to #314A63. but then again, if G was looking at that, a legit site could have body bg and text the same color and tables with another bg color to display the text.... It would be pretty complicated for G to sort it out.
I also would have thought that Google would have a word density algo: we know that words like "the", "and", "it" are very common but you look at their text and you'd think they would notice that the frequent word is not one which should be frequent. Even word throws up a warning if the same word is repeated twice. Well how many "warnings" would it take before the algo decided the page was dodgy and had to go into some nasty bottomless pit for manual checking? Sarah
Google can see this and does do purges every once and a while. Probably not often enough. This site is probably seeing good results immediately, but sooner or later they will get penalized and Google will drop them. I'm pretty sure I've seen it before and it will come around again. I believe the best you can do is report them and let Google sort them out.
haha, wow. I never expected to see that much hidden text- seems a little pathetic.. QUESTION: is it actually helping their results?
As I was reading this post I got more and more interested in seeing this site. I check it out an WOW that hidden text is longer than War and Peace! I hope all search engine teach them a lesson, it's just not right.
well I doubt its the hidden text placing them #1 for international rentals, but its still pretty sad.
That's bloody hilarious ! The reason they're doing so well is inbounds (all are from travel/related sites) and of course the (I hate to say it) spam. The site's footprint isn't anything special. Unfortunately, the spam is there to catch derivatives, and doing a damn good job of it too from the looks. That's life (and money). JL
Like I always said, search engines arnt that smart. dont think its giving them any major benifit though.
WOW...At least you think they would put it in a div or layer or something and hide it through the CSS so it wouldn't be so obvious.
I've seen sites like this come and go quite frequently - Google does seem to have an auto-remove feature where the hidden text is in plain HTML, but only on a periodic basis - possibly ties it in with SERP updates. I wouldn't expect the site to continue to exist in Google at least for very long.
I'm optimising 'Bulgaria villas' range of keyword terms at the moment, and this was a site I noticed on the first page of the results. Other than that I've been in this business 3 years, and never seen them in the serps, so there obviously not doing a good job! I don't think it's making a big difference to the serps but thought it was unbelievable that G would let this kind of stuff go on still. EDIT: you have to look at this: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ca...y=Bulgaria/country.html+bulgaria+villas&hl=en
Rest assured i will be firing off an e-mail for ya,, to google both thru their complaints form...and thru my adsense account (as that gets read)...for what its worth. must be some kind of record...if you go to WHO-IS and get either the contact details of the owner...or especially the host...a quick mail about how they are hosting a site that breaks internet protocols normally helps...especially as it give the host a bad name. GEM
When I first put my site up I got the idea for hidden text. I never got penalized (that I know of), but as I began reading about the penalties, I got rid of it. Once in a while I still find a hidden keyword on some of my pages. It's just not worth the risk.
For the phrase 'vaction rentals' they are on Google page 9 (using default 10 per page). 'Vacation Rentals' is the first phrase used in the hidden text. So, it is possible that they *are* being penalized for certain keywords.