Include files - hidden text or not?

Hi all,

My boss is hoping to work with another company who at the moment are refusing to play ball because we use include files to boost our SEO.

From what I'm aware this is ok, but the other company are touting this as hidden text/seo spam.....are they right?

I don't duplicate content within the include files so there is no keyword spam issue with that. Each include file is dedicated to a particular keyword/keyphrase.

If someone could give me an answer....preferably if someone has already asked the question of Google and had a reply, I'd be interested to know the answer.

Many thanks,

Giles

 

If you use hidden text designed to increase your search engine rankings then its spam, against googles guidelines and you could get banned from google in the future.

Its your decision if you want to do this but most sites won't partner with sites that could get banned from google in case it reflects badly on them.

 

Be very careful with that. Just improve your SEO with real techniques, not cheap antics. If you get banned from Google you might was well change your company name.

chad

 

So would a better way be to use absolute positioned text further down the page but coded at the top of the html? Or is that bad too??

Sorry for the noob questions - it's been a long time since I was up to date with SEO.

Many thanks,

G

 

can you explain what you mean by " include files" ? maybe give an example?

 

I've just had a chat with the IT crew and they've fully explained what they've done :-(

They call on fields in a SQL database which has my SEO copy within those fields, they then (using CSS) hide that text with a 'show hidden' command....which I hadn't realised they were doing!

I'm getting them to 'unhide' the text and place it on the page as normal body text.

This is what happens when you get our IT dept to do something...they're great but they don't understand the implications of doing these things.

Thanks for the help chaps,

G

 

It's not too late to educate them about the pitfalls of hidden text whether CSS or any other method (is there?).

SEO people are at their best when they have substantial web development skills.

Yes you could be banned by Google, just like Google Germany site few months ago, but you can always ask for reinstatement once you clean up your mess.