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Hidden Text:  A Deceptive SEO Method

Today, there is a lot of competition amongst webmasters to get their websites listed in the top pages of all of the major search engines. SEO techniques are becoming much more popular and almost all webmasters use search engine optimization to help their website get a good ranking. However, it appears that some people turn to deceptive SEO protocols to get a higher search engine ranking. And one of these deceptive SEO methods is using hidden text in the matter of the website.

Hidden text refers to the text in a website that cannot be seen by visitors to the website, but is read by search engines. With this tactic, a web page is filled with keywords that are picked up by search engines so that the page ranking will increase. However, this is considered to be search spam by most search engines.

The implementation of hidden text in websites has been in existence for a long time. It started through misinformed webmasters and novice search engine optimization operators around 1996. This was a period where search engines were always looking out for websites so as to index as many pages as possible to increase their indices. In that period, all forms of spam were generally tolerated. However, over the years search engines have tried to control SEO tactics such that today, if caught using black hat SEO techniques, you run the risk of your site being permanently banned from the major search engines.

Remember that search engine optimization is not done with the intention of duping search engines. By hiding text in the HTML to get a good ranking in the search engines, the search engines may be fooled for a short period of time. However, you run the risk of your website being permanently banned from search engines when this deceptive SEO method is discovered.

There are many ways of creating hidden text in a website, where the oldest and easiest method is through using font that is the same color as the background. So if your text is against a white background, you just have to change the color of all hidden text in the website to white. Another method employed for hidden text is setting the background color of the page with an image and then to set the font color to match that color.

Over the passage of time, Google could detect hidden text that was hidden in websites following these two methods. So instead of setting the color of the font to be exactly the same color as the background, they started setting font colors that were almost matching the background color. With this method, the webmaster, if caught, could argue that they did not actually violate the search engine’s SEO methods, as the text wasn’t quite invisible.

Though it is easy for humans to review pages and find hidden text by using the command ‘Select All’ to highlight the whole page, this is not so easily done by search engines. This is why some webmasters hide their text in text that appears only when highlighted. You can also find the hidden text by using the mouse to find the invisible text that is found between arrows where it is highlighted.

Today, some webmasters also use style sheets to create hidden text with hopes that the search engines will not be able to read style sheets and thus be able to find any hidden or invisible text. There may be some legal reasons or uses for hiding text using this method; however, misuse of these techniques can lead to the penalization of your website when caught. It only takes a spam report from your competitor to make you and your website end up in a soup.

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