I had a site brought to my attention using a tactic that I've seen many times before. Just wondering what the consensus is in regards to whether this technique should count as cloaking. If you visit the site http://www.hireacamera.com/ and click on the resources link at the bottom you'll see a whack of text pop into view. It's obviously a technique to cram in their keywords as there are no real resources listed (oh, and the text is basically hidden from view). I'll note that this wasn't brought to my attention by a client and we don't have a client competing with this site. It was brought to my attention in an email from one of our site visitors who asked if this was cloaking. I count it as such but am interested in what others think on the subject. So ... what are your thoughts? ...
To me this is not cloaking as the visitors and the SE get the same content (same source code). It's just a borderline trick that may affect their site if a manual review is done. Till that time, it'll help giving context and keyword to their page
umm, take a closer look at google TOS, regarding CSS, display: none; or visibility: hidden; is considered cloaking, even if clicked the content is displayed, it is initally hidden from view(cloaking) when googlebot visits the site and views the LYNX version it will not match user version. googlebot now reads css files and the attributes in relation to the displayed content. please remember, though the web is moving fast with technologies, google isn't and refusing too. my site was recently flagged by google for this techniques, hence why im warning forum users. blackhat= banned greyhat= google will notice before long and then heavily penalize your website, if not ban it whitehat=keeps google happy, there policy is ,want more clicks? buy adwords! for most of us our website is a source for revenue, thus stick to google TOS, its your living there crush otherwise.
This is correct. It is cloaking. I work with accessibility and ran into Matt Cutts at a conference. He has just spoken about NOT being able to use visibility: hidden on text items. However, it is a common practice in accessibility to hide skip links off a page or with visibility hidden. Matt told me that to be safe, to make sure not to trigger a ban of pages or site, that we need to make the link visible. He said while knowing it is accessibility tagging he personally would not devalue, people on the team might not know that. So this post is correct. It is cloaking of a type and google frowns on it immensely