Summary: Using hidden text or hidden links is a way of presenting two different versions of your website – one for the search engines and one for your visitors. Use this and search engines will likely perceive your site as untrustworthy, which could damage your rankings.
If you hide text or links on your site, visitors won’t be able to see it but search engines will. So you’re presenting two versions of your website. You might do this to try and gain an SEO advantage. How?
Frequent examples of hidden text include:
- Using white text on a white background
- Using coloured text on the same colour background
- Including text behind an image
- Using CSS to hide text
- Setting the font size to 0
In all of these examples, the visitor can’t see the text but the search engine spider can.
Examples of hidden links include:
- Using the same colour link as the page background
- Using CSS to make the link very small e.g. 1 pixel high
- Hiding the link in punctuation – a hyphen for example.
Google spends a lot of time and money ensuring its results are accurate – that’s Google’s main business so you’d expect nothing less. Its search engine bots are extremely good at detecting hidden text and links and so it won’t bring your site any SEO benefit. In fact, Google states that if it believes your site contains hidden links or text, it may remove it from the Google index.
Analyse your site carefully for anything that might be considered to be hidden text or links. If you find hidden text or hidden links, remove them or ensure that they are no longer hidden. Check your listing in Google – if your site has already been removed. make your changes and then submit your site to Google for reconsideration.
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