SEO Reports - don't use invisible text - EVER
Saturday December 13, 2008
It doesn't matter why you're doing it, you should never have text on your Web pages that is the same color as the background text. Search engines consider this to be spam, even if, like on Paintings by Al Booth, you are only using it as a design hack. It's a dangerous hack to use unless you don't care about search engine rankings.
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Comments
It is not just using the same background colours, using CSS command such as
display: none ;
indent: -999 ;
To hide text will have the same negative impact.
thanks for the tip
Search engines are probably smarter than the logic here implies. I work at profitable/SEO-savvy website that has a dedicated SEO department and our site is loaded with plenty of display:none layer content which sits idle waiting for a user to trigger it. The point might be restated that hidden content will never give you an SEO edge, and if used maliciously it might be harmful.
Sorry. But I don’t understand if the use of display:none or visibility:hidden may penalize SEO activity.
In page with virtual tab is standard to use display:none to switch from a tab to others.
Thanks.
What do you think about using:
list-style: none;
We use this in CSS menus.
Okay, absolutes are nearly always incorrect.
Yes, it’s possible to display: none; visibility: hidden; and so on to valid effect without SEO penalty. Yes, search engines are smarter than that (probably).
But when you look at high traffic search terms and the pages that show up in the top 10 or 20 results, they don’t use these techniques.
I’m not saying never use these tools, in fact, I have tutorials showing how to use them. But if you use them, you should realize that you may incur an SEO penalty. It may be negligible or it may not. If your site relies on search engines for traffic and you rely on traffic for money, do you want to take the risk?
This is especially true if you’re just using the technique to get some fancy design to display. Personally, I don’t think the design should get in the way of SEO - it should enhance it. YMMV
If you Google “Designing with Web Standards” the number 2 search result will be the Amazon page and that page has 10 to 20 references of display:none in the page source (In CSS blocks and inline styles). The alternative with layered content is to add more ajax/script to the page and for a big site this becomes a drag page rendering.
Someone said me that some kind of penalization are made by humans, and not by algorithm.
If you use Buttons with css backgrounds, you have to use visibility:hidden or display:none ! Correct me if i am wrong !
When you have a button that is only an image made by CSS, you have to put a tag inside your , like a span or something, describing your button.
But this description shouldnt show up !! So You have to turn it invisible! Itīs only for the search engines and for acessibility.
Am i wrong ?
If you use Buttons with css backgrounds, you have to use visibility:hidden or display:none ! Correct me if i am wrong !
When you have a button that is only an image made by CSS, you have to put a tag inside your href, like a span or something, describing your button.
But this description shouldnt show up !! So You have to turn it invisible! Itīs only for the search engines and for acessibility.
Am i wrong ?
I could not agree with you any more, I have seen many people try to invisible text out and never know the consequences of it.
@Merlinox I am not for sure about that but I believe the system can pick it up its pretty hard for people to go manually to every single website