My SEO Guy did this... will it get me penalized?

did you read the rest of the post? were you just hiding text or did it serve an actual, functional purpose?

 

tell your seo to work more on linking and avoid hidden tricks

mk

 

thought I'd update you on what he sent me today:

==
I do apologize for not responding today, I was not in the office at all as I dislocated my shoulder so I was in the hospital having it looked at and at home taking it easy for the day as such.

In response to your manual review point, we have had our sites manually reviewed after being turned in 4 times and all 4 times passed with flying colors. Exalia.com is one such example - they were actually removed from the Google index for some attempted SEO they did themselves, then we had the site manually inspected to fix the problems they caused by trying to "guess" at our methods and see if they could do it themselves. The site was inspected with our code in place and re-inserted. They were literally pegged for some black hat stuff they were doing, which would've raised Google's alarms to carefully inspect the site, then came back and approved our methods. You're welcome to contact them to discuss the situation as they'll vouch for it.

Clearly our pricing structure is based on the idea that unless you are showing up - I.E. not banned, we don't get paid. I have been doing SEO for nearly 10 years and know several Google employees personally, however if you are uncomfortable with this specific tactic we can avoid doing it - however we have not in any way done as you said anything that will get you banned or "not by the book" - we've been there and done that on this method. There is more there technically than you apparently realize from a programming perspective for it to just be banned for hidden text - if Google wants to start banning every CSS DIV that is hidden, they'd have to ban literally thousands of sites using it for development purposes including their own. As I said, this is a method we've tried, tested, had checked, been turned in for, been manually inspected for, and in all instances have had no problem - and on your current site is has contributed to top 10 rankings in nearly no time. However again, we are happy to avoid it if you wish - it's your call.
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I just don't see how this could be admissable, it's obviously solely for rankings, and isn't that the google golden rule? (Design sites for people not bots?)

 

i heard that google was the first SE that started to get into CSS. Yahoo and MSN might be okay with it.

I would remove this code asap.

 

I already killed the code so I'm not sweatin' it. It's my SEO that's worried, I haven't fired him yet

 

So far most of the responses have attacked the OP's SEO guy pretty adamently for black hat SEO. This sort of technique is too shady for my taste, although if I did this in the first place I would do a few things. First, not naming the class 'seo'. Second, turning the DIV and H1s into an actual static floating menu, with a button somewhere that could turn it on. Any SEO benefit could be retained while giving it a functional purpose and moving out of the grey.

Let me pose a question, hopefully not getting too OT.

Let's say you have an established product, and one day a competitor takes over your positions in the SERPs using grey tactics like this. It hurts business. A lot. Not only is your product of a higher quality, but it has been around much longer and you have never used shady SEO tactics.

So, you do the right thing and notify Google. Nothing happens. You notify them again. Nothing happens. You continue to lose market share.

What do you do?

In a competitive market, it only takes a single edge to cut off the head of a competitor.

 

Time for another update for those who are following my quest for whitehat SEO, here's his latest Email:

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Please understand I’m not trying to convey an attitude of “lack of care or belief” of wrong doing. It’s just that I’ve done SEO for a very long time, I’ve had this conversation before, and have gone straight to the source, and have already had the answers provided for me. I do completely understand your concern and I’m more than willing to take a 100% “white hat” approach to your site without using any even questionable tactics if you wish – that’s your call. This is really the only step of our process that isn’t completely white hat, and I do concede it’s a somewhat gray area – but definitely not black after much research and inspection. I’m willing to not apply this tactic if you wish.
==

My concern now is that there may be other things in my shop or database that he's done that are less than savory. First of all, when I signed up with this guy, I got a pay-for-performance based deal, which I know now leads down a bad path.

I feel like I got a pretty deal though given the downfalls of such an arrangement, I only have less than 10 keywords, 3 of those are low competition, but they're ones that I wanted, and my biggest keywords were fine and he's gotten me ranked for those.

The alarms started ringing when all of a sudden I checked my SERPS and I was ranking for most of my keywords.. now granted G is updating keywords much more often now than before, I thought it very odd that most of my targetted keywords showed up all of a sudden and all at the top as opposed to working their way up.

So I've been doing some research on my backlinks and looking through the code, and that's when I found the class referenced here. I am glad that this guy finally admitted taht what he's doing isn't completely white hat -- uh duh!--

So my question is now, should I fire this joker now and move on, or trust that he's going to use only 'pure whitehat' on my site?

It's a fine line, do I revoke his access to my site and consider the contract void or do I let him continue and hope he doesn't start using some other less than by the book tactic to boost my ranks?

 

He really didn't do anything terrible. There are people on here who are very hardcore white hat folks who would tell you to can him, but in reality the guy is doing his job and apparently pretty effectively. Post or PM the site and I or someone else can look for the obvious shady stuff, but I wouldn't necessarily fire him.

 

I may be mistaken, but I really don't see employees who work at Google "making the guidelines" that will personally and manually go through someone's site just to verify it legit. That is what the algo is for and they just continually tweak it. Plus, what do those employees do for Google? Janitors? interns?

Drop this hack. Another thing that is funny to me is that he said he already has a good answer for you. That tells me that he has been questioned before about his tactics and has a script to go by now that sounds "convincing". Drop him.