we all know CSS is helpful for making all webpages to be standard in a given font, color, etc.... just wondering, if i make color of a word same as the background's color in external css file, will search engies know i am hidng some words ? will it hurt SEO ? ___________________ James Register .mobi domain name Furniture manufacturer
Why you want to have words with the same color as background ? Keyword stuffing is not good. Look at cache page and you will see how google see your page.
Yes, Google and other search engines will spot this deliberate attempt to deceive them. This could cause your website to be banned from the search engine results, so don't do it. (This is known as a 'black-hat' SEO technique) Cryo.
Your site may get penalized if the SEs discover keyword stuffing as this practice is considered unethical, Some search engines may even ban the offending Web pages from their search results. Keyword stuffing also is referred to as keyword loading and spamdexing.
Hehe, you can stuff your site full with keywords, it will only help you get banned in google...in msn it is helpfull, but that one sucks, these days only G matters
best not to get started on things like this... i'm sure such simple methods are detectable by the search engines... also, most experienced webmasters would simply click on ctrl+a on your site to detect any of these hidden text... now, be a good boy, ok?
I think font sizes do affect SEO in a small manner. CSS can make your site look pretty, as intended, so the HTML structure is important and can be done via CSS. Overall, I don't think there is *that* much an effect though.
If you develop a site using CSS entirely, it may actually help you with SEO. I always build with full css (meaning no tables, just div's). The search engines want to see more content then coding on your site, so if you use CSS you can accomplish that.
It's depends what you do with your css. If you use it for "black hat" tricks, it's could badly hurt your site. (Matt Cutts write about some sites being penalized for using such techniques) If you use it to make a nice and clean layout, to keep text together, up in the page, it could affect your site positively.
Reducing the amount of code on your webpage (by moving it to an external stylesheet) can improve your text-to-code ratio, which is beneficial to SEO efforts. Cryo.
Too much of anything is bad, you do it once for a couple of words.. it should be fine.. but when you try to stuff in many more... Google starts staring at you.. and it will soon come to know your cheap tactic...AND Then then you can tell yourself.... :Welcome to the Sandbox:
This is probably IMO one of the first techniques that webmasters used to try and out fox the SE's. So therefore it is one of the first black hat tatics that the Se's learned to spot. I use certain programs to check the SEO validity of pages I am submitting and if you try and put text in that is the same colour as your background alarm bells go off. Banned time for keyword stuffing. CSS to me is the only standard to use for SEO. Straight HTML pages are a thing of the past and are getting more so as more tags are removed in the new standards.
Is there any evidence I can look at to back this up? I've seen sites that have low text-to-code ratios that rank well. Search engines are interested in content, not code (dubious practices aside).