Hidden Text in Websites - What counts as hidden text?
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There are many kind of text that are considered to be hidden text (spam). Some of them may be created by spammers. Innocent Web designers might use this kind of text by mistake, however. The following types of text should be avoided.
Color matching
The simplest method that spammers use to create hidden text is to make the font the same color as the background. Search engines can easily detect this type of hidden text.
Below is an example in which the background color is black bgcolor="#000000" and the font color is black <font color="#000000"> this is hidden text</font>. Just double click on the black rectangle to see the text:
| this is hidden text this is hidden text this is hidden text this is hidden text |
Often, spammers also consider background images. They will set the image color to be the same as the font color. This is a little harder to detect.
Software can easily detect hidden text created by using the color matching scheme. Humans can also detect it, by selecting all or highlighting the whole page. In Internet Explorer we can use Edit > Select All or press Ctrl+A to highlight the entire page. Highlighting all the text will change the text's color so that it no longer matches the background color. Another way to detect hidden text in Internet Explorer is to double click to select a word, and triple click to select a complete paragraph.
Using Div to hide text
If you use Div, then putting text in that Division and setting Div style to “display: none” will hide the whole Div, including all of the text it contains. Some SEOs consider it hidden text; others don't, because the technique is mostly used in creating menus. It is also difficult to detect because it uses style sheets. Unlike color matching, the hidden text cannot be revealed by highlighting the whole page.
<div style=”display: none”>This is hidden text</div>
One more property of Division is Position, and this can be used to hide text from the browser and user . You can set Division position absolutely, or relatively. Using absolute positioning, you can simply position the text you wish to hide any number of pixels off the screen to the left of the window. Here is some example code:
<div style=”position: absolute; left: -500px”>This is hidden text</div>
By using this method, Division will be positioned -500 pixels left, and this area is out of the boundaries of browser’s viewable area. It will not appear on the screen.
Another property of style sheets is visibility. Spammers, for example, might set visibility to hidden. This command can cause the browser to keep the text in Div hidden.
<div style=”visibility: hidden”>This is hidden text</div>
Another way to hide text from the user is to put text in the Back or Front layer instead of the immediately visible layer. The third dimension of viewable screen is the Z-index. The first two dimensions are (X) and (Y), which indicate “left to right” and “up to down” respectively. The Z-index indicates “back to front” for layers of Web pages. Using the Z-index, Web designers can hide text in the previous layer.
These methods are also used in creating of menus or navigation bars in websites, so search engines index them. But most people think it is a spamming technique. If you have used this technique and are concerned about whether Google has indexed your site, here is what you can do to find out:
- Search for a string of text that is very unusual in your site that includes the text you have in your navigation bar within quotation marks "" and see if Google has it.
- Search in the search engine for the specific files that contain these types of hidden text, and see if the search engine has indexed it or not.
This does not necessarily mean that they will give it a value in terms of rankings -- but at least you know it's in there and can do some other tests later!
Use of a separate style sheet file
Some spammers consider using a separate style sheet file. Since style sheets are now readable by most of the Web browsers in use today, many webmasters who would never consider using HTML font code to hide text are back in the spam game, hoping that search engines cannot read style sheets and automatically detect invisible or hidden text. While Google and other search engines have already done many updates to their algorithms to improve search quality, they are also working hard on automated detection algorithms for various classes of search engine spam.
Noscript tags
Noscript tags can help us to hide the text in a tag and only display it when the user's browser will not view scripts. This technique can be used to gain ranking, but text hidden in noscript tags carries much less value than normal text.
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