Hidden Text in Websites - Hidden text is spam
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The idea of loading a Web page with keywords can be bad for the visitor but it can improve page ranking in the search engine results. This technique actually worked on the first generation of search engines. It was heavily exploited by the adult entertainment industry, however, which forced search tools to punish users of hidden text. Today, every major search engine considers hidden text to be search spam. Many search engines can now detect the use of hidden text, and often remove offending pages from their database or lower a site’s positioning when their spiders detect it. Using hidden text is a good way to get your site blacklisted.
In the search engine world, spam is defined as the manipulation of a Web page to give it an artificial boost in the search engine rankings. Generally, search engines themselves define what they consider to be search spam -- so spam is whatever the search engines say it is. Each of the major search engines provide specific guidelines describing what webmasters should and should not do to their Web pages in order to achieve a better search engine ranking.
Google's guidelines can be found here:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
Check here for Yahoo's guidelines:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/index.html
If you want to tell Google about a site that uses hidden text or doorway pages to get a high ranking, you can submit a spam report to Google here:
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
In this link, Google openly states that “ "Trying to deceive (spam) our web crawler by means of hidden text, deceptive cloaking or doorway pages compromises the quality of our results and degrades the search experience for everyone. We think that's a bad thing."
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