Using CSS to hide SEO content

A buddy of mine who seems to know what he's doing suggested an SEO tactic for my site. I was having the problem of Google and other SEs not crawling all the way through my site. I have forums and they don't have a feature that lists all of the topics in a sitemap type form that makes it easy for SEs to find.

He suggested that on the home page of my site I put a link to all of my forum topics in a div. Then he told me to create a css class and set display to none and then assign the class to that div. The code obviously works and it gives a kind of sitemap on the home page without it displaying to visitors.

He said that SEs such as google don't consider external style sheets and that it would view the page as if the div were not hidden. I wonder about the accuracy of this statement and I'm worried I could get banned out of a search engine for using tactics like this.

Does anyone have any experience with this? Can anyone tell me with any certainty if I need to worry about a ban?

 

Yeah, I have experience with this...

Personally, I think it's a cop-out.
It's a really really easy way to spam the SE's and not clever.

It has worked on sites that I have run in the past, but it has since been removed.

My suggestion to you, would be (If you really want to do this)...

OK, you want to hide the links. If you are going to so that, then at least make it so that the links can be viewed if someone wants to see them.
To do this, you would have to set a property that means when a certian link is clicked on, then the hidden content is displayed.

Really, there are better ways to get the site spidered (Like adding a site map), but if you would like to know how to hide the content, I would be more than happy to paste some code for you.

 

I actually already have it setup on the home page of the site (http://www.pegasusgalaxy.com).

I have been thinking about doing exactly what you suggested and that is to create a separate site map page and put all of the links there. It would probably save some load time on the home page too since the link generation is dynamic and pulls from the database with every page view.

 

A little off the topic but I have a similar dilemma except with SERPS.Many of the top ranked sites for the keywords I target obviously do something similar. Their main pages look really nice with nice backgrounds and pretty pictures but literally no text, few links and in many cases no keywords. But their #1. I got curious and spidered their site and you wouldn't believe the text that came up spidered. Nothing but pure spam that isn't visible to the viewer. Done either through CSS or hidden layers. Definitely black hat tactics IMO and not something I would really want to do. BUT......when much of your competition does it and sits in the top 10 spots and you try and optimize your site the ethical and correct way and can't get higher then 30 or 40 in the SERPS, whats the incentive to do it the right way? Obviously Google and other SE's can't detect it or don't care so why not take advantage of it? At least you'll be playing on equal terms and have the opportunity to at least get visitors to your site. Once their there they can easily decide if your products or services are what their looking for and stay or leave. This has been so frustrating to me that I've done the CSS and hidden layer thing a few times over the last week or so but guess my conscience has always gotten the best of me and I've deleted the changes and never published them. But my conscience is wearing thin. I'm not sure how much longer I can hold out.

OK....off the soapbox. Back to frustration mode.

 

You can choose your actions but you can't choose the consequences.

 

Welll...it has to be asked why you feel a need to even hide your own site links in the first place!!

If you've got quality forum software, such as vBulletin, then you can simply use the XML feed from the forum to create a list of topics on any page. That's precisely what I do here in the left hand nav: http://www.platinax.co.uk

I can encourage strong indexing of good forum topics, and my latest blog news as well. And all without having to resort to hidden links.

Really, if the links are worth having, it's worth making sure that they are visible in the first place.

 

I decided to unhide them. I created a separate site map and put everything on there. My forums software doesn't have an xml feed. I use invision and it doesn't have quite as many bells and whistles as vBulletin although I can't speak for the newest version of invision.

I simply connected to the db and queried out all of the topics I wanted. Seems almost as simple.

 

Can someone who knows about "Hiding Text" through CSS or Hidden Layers take a look at this page and tell me if this is happening? And if so, how can you tell?

www *downpaymentsolutions *com/

Another webmaster has stated that their spider found +1000 links on this page but when I view it in a browser I don't find nearly that many.

Thanks!

 

They seem to be hiding their links a little differently than the way I was doing it. I was putting everything I wanted to hide in a div (layer) and then setting the css display attribute to none. This site has just about everything in layers and has all of the links in layers that are underneath other layers so they are not visible.

 

I just checked it real quick and when I spidered it I come up with about 125 links on the page. Which looks about right. What I noticed when comparing the spidered page to the real page is that there seems to be some extra text in the spidered version. Not much though. My guess would be that it might be hidden in the white space near the bottom of the page.

Edit: Just re-checked and came up with 86 links on their page and the same when spidered so it doesn't seem like their hiding any links. Just maybe a little text.

 

There has got to be a way to spider those layers. Does anyone know how?

 

You could disallow the google spiders looking at your External CSS as well in your robots.txt, that's if they ever did decide to look at external CSS.

It's bad practise though to be hiding links. You'd be better spending time creating more interesting content to pull in the punters

 

The more I look at the guy's page the more I think he might not be hiding anything. After all, couldn't I view the source code of his page and be able to see what was in the layers?

 

Yes. That's what I did when I checked. Compared the displayed code to the spidered text. He seems to be using an ungodly number of layers but not hiding them. As I mentioned, there appears to be some text that shows up on the spidered page but not the displayed page. But not really that much. He doesn't seem to be doing anything real bad.