Are you sure that your website is free of hidden text? There are many ways to
create hidden text unintentionally. By checking your web pages, you make sure
that you won’t be penalized for something you did not intend to do.

Why is hidden text a problem?

Google doesn’t like hidden text and hidden links at all. Here’s the
official text from Google’s guidelines:

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be
perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines
differently than to visitors. […]

Hidden links are links that are intended to be crawled by Googlebot,
but are unreadable to humans. […]

If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are
deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and
will not appear in search results pages.

How can you hide text on your web pages?

There are many methods that allow you to hide text on your web pages:

• using white text on a white background
• including text behind an image
• using CSS to hide text
• setting the font size to 0 or a negative value

If you wittingly use some of these methods on your web pages, you should
make sure that you remove them as soon as possible.

Are you sure that you don’t use hidden text unintentionally?

There are a few legitimate reasons to hide text on a web page. For
example, you could use CSS to replace a text link with a more pretty
graphical button.

Many content management systems (CMS) use the CSS display:none technique
to create drop-down menus or other expandable web page elements. Although
these elements are not designed to mislead web surfers, search engines might
interpret the hidden texts as a spamming attempt.

Another way to create hidden text is to provide enhancements for visually
impaired people. If a lot of text on your website can only be seen by screen
reader software and not by regular web surfers then some search engines
might misinterpret this as spamming.

How can Google discover hidden text on your web pages?

It’s relatively easy for Google to find out if your website contains
hidden text. However, it’s difficult to find out whether a page uses hidden
text for legitimate reasons or not.

Google’s spam filters might be applied to your website if the following
happens:

• The hidden content contains keywords that are unrelated to the rest
  of your content.

   

• The hidden text contains too many keywords. If a large part of your
  web page content is hidden, your website might look suspicious.

   

• You overuse "legitimate" ways to hide text on your web pages. This might flag your site for a human review.

   

• One of your competitors reports your site to Google because he detected spam techniques on your site.

Google won’t ban your site if you use hidden text in a way that appears to be legitimate. They try to detect intent. Don’t try to cheat search engines. If you use ethical search engine optimization methods then you don’t risk getting banned from the search results.

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The most important factor for successful SEO (hint: it’s not inbound links)
If you want to get high rankings on search engines then you have to consider many different factors.

On-page factors and off-page factors

Regarding on-page factors, the content of your web pages is important, the position of your keywords in your web page elements is important, the keyword density matters and much more.

When it comes to off-page factors, the number of the links that point to your website is very important. It’s also important that the the links to your website contain your keywords and that the links are from related websites.

All of these factors are important. However, there is another factor that is even more important than the other ones. That single factor will determine whether your search engine optimization activities will be successful or not.

A single factor is more important than all other factors

You might have lots of inbound links with the anchor text "my
great product" and your web page might be perfectly optimized for the keyword "my great product".

You might even be number 1 on Google for the keyword "my great product": if the wrong people or too few people search for that keyword then your SEO efforts will be in vain. The most important factor that decides whether you succeed or not are the keywords that you choose for promoting your website.

If you target the wrong keywords, you’ll waste a lot of time, energy and money.

Don’t think that you already know the answer

Many webmasters think that they already know the best keyword for their websites. If they haven’t done some research, they are usually wrong. There are several reasons for that:

• You know your business much better than anybody else. You know the special terms that are used in your branch and you know what you
  should search for when you’re looking for products like yours.

  Your customers don’t know as much as you. They don’t know your terminology and they might use totally different keywords.

• Did you consider the intention of the searcher? Just because a keyword is used very often on search engines it doesn’t mean that you’ll get many customers. People who find your website through a special keyword might not be interested in purchasing.

It’s very important that you take some time to find the best keywords for your website. The time and efforts that you invest in finding the right keywords will pay back in no time.

Effective keywords must be popular, specific, and they must be used by motivated searchers. Detailed information on how to find the best keywords can be found in our free SEO book.

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