Black Hat SEO: Hiding Text on Website

It is my 6th year as a SEO practitioner in 2010, but I have to admit that I still have a lot to learn about the trade.  Since  the start of my career, people have been asking me on my stand on white hat and black hat  SEO.

White Hat SEO - SEOers who follow search engine guidelines and rules. Search engines are not static set of rules and things that may be considered legitimate one day may be considered unethical or deceptive on the next.”

- SEOBook

Black hat SEO - Black Hat Search Engine Optimization tactics that are counter to best practices such as the Google Webmaster Guidelines.”

-SEOMOZ

Here is one  Black Hat SEO tactic that your competitors may be doing:

Hiding Text

A “hidden text” is also known as “invisible text” or “fake text”.  It is a hidden textual content which human visitors cannot view it, but still is readable by search engines. The idea of this process is too load the web page with important keyword  phrases.  If you follow this practices, your site maybe removed on Google index and will not appear on Google Search Results

Here are several kinds of Hidden Text that Google considers as SPAM.

• Setting font size to zero ‘0′

• Including text on your images

• Hiding words on your CSS

• For this example, a Web Hosting Company based in Singapore is trying to hide important keywords on their front page. They place it on the top portion of the page so that search engine crawlers will see the content first. I  searched one of the keywords that is hidden and the website is in the Top 10.

• An SEO company put a hidden link on a client’s website. Tip: Before choosing an SEO Company, check the company by visiting their clients’ website. Check if they are practicing SEO ethically. In connection with this, you might want to check out a previous article I wrote, “Doing the SEO with Honesty and Sincerity”.

So, why do you need to know this unethical stuff?

To ensure that you are practicing it unknowingly.  Another good reason is competition.  You will be able to identify if your competitors are doing so currently. My conclusion on this black hat tactic is instead of cheating search engines, site owners and webmasters should look or go for an ethical process that can improve there ranking and usability.

Here are some terms and policies from the search engines:

Google Search Guidelines:

“Avoid hidden text or hidden links.”

Yahoo! Policy:

“Search engine spam is pages that are considered unwanted and appear in search results with the intent to deceive or attract clicks at the expense of a poor user experience.”

Reporting a Spammer to Google:

http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

If  your want Google to reconsider your website;

http://www.google.com/support

Go Here:

Online Marketing

SEO Singapore