Hidden Texts : A Reason Behind Penalty

Hidden texts are one of the main reasons for search engine penalties. There are possibilities that you already have some hidden texts in your webpages if you are using CSS template driven CMS such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Blogger etc.

No search engines like spamming of any nature and hiding texts is one of them. Google clearly stated their views on this..

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.

What is Hidden Text?
Hidden Texts are those texts (mainly keywords) embedded in a webpage in a manner that they are invisible to naked eyes, but accessible for search engine spiders.

Why these are used?
The hidden texts are one of the blackhat techniques to get high ranking in search engines almost instantly. The rankings are not stable and last for merely a month before search engines find and ban them.

How to hide texts on webpages?
There lot of ways to hide text, but the most used one is CSS based. Here are few of them

• Using CSS selector “display:none”
• Using same color for both texts and background
• Setting the font size to 0
• Adding Texts behind an Image using CSS
• Using Javascript code to hide texts. (Check the example in the video below)

How to find hidden texts?
If you think you have hidden texts in your webpage, you can find them by going to the source code of your webpage. First, look for display:none in your CSS and note the div id or class name. Then search for the div name in your source code and check if there are any texts that are invisible in html output in browser. Remove them if any.