All know that search engines (not meet Google, but belike every one of them) grimace on unseeable text. Some grouping ingest unseeable book to stuff keywords on their pages so that when grouping type those words on the search engine, your place will show, even though your tender does not have whatever circumpolar sign of those words.
I have never believed in hiding keywords in unseeable book or whatever of those cloak and dagger stuff, and thus I don’t execute such things. Imagine my surprise, when one day, a whatever eld back, I suddenly found my pages on thefreecountry.com receiving a Page Rank of 0 because of unseeable book on the page. (See my another article on Google Page Rank if you don’t know what Page Rank is.)
No, I did not compromise on my principles or anything same that. I did not try whatever underhand tactics to stuff keywords, etc. The think is more prosaic.
At that time, I had partially regenerate thefreecountry.com to ingest CSS for its place design instead of the traditional <font> and <table>tags. In those years, there were ease a whatever grouping using the old browser 4 which did not hold CSS correctly. To accomodate those people, I proven to attain my place degrade gracefully when it perceived an old browser being used. I also put a message that contained the following text:
This tender uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control its appearance. Since CSS is poorly supported on old browsers same browser 4.X, you may attending numerous oddities in the appearance of the page. However, you should ease be healthy to feature the information and navigate using the links.
This book was enclosed in a incase that was unseeable from view if you were using a modern browser, but circumpolar if you utilised browser 4. I utilised the usual methods of getting assorted browsers to load assorted stylesheets as mentioned in my article How to Use Different CSS Style Sheets For Different Browsers (and How to Hide CSS Code from Older Browsers).
Unfortunately, Google’s spider perceived that whatever book was hidden, and not realizing that it was also circumpolar in another cases, automatically assumed I was employing whatever sort of skulduggery to get those keywords into its index. It then penalized my place accordingly.
When I realized that my endeavor to help my visitors was going to cost my site’s position in the search engine results, I immediately pulled the message, and its accompanying CSS, from the site. Visitors using old browsers would ease be healthy to ingest the site, but they would not receive whatever friendly explanation.
Although the days of browser 4 are daylong gone, the lessons learnt from that incident are ease useful today. Undoubtedly many of you will not even dream of using keyword stuffing in unseeable book and the like. However, as I found out from the above incident, Google’s search engine mechanism is far from intelligent, and its unseeable book spotting algorithm crapper bite lawful webmasters too. If it even senses unseeable text, even for an innoxious determine same mine, your place is history.
Some structure in which you strength inadvertently ingest unseeable book (possibly without lettered if you ingest third-party scripts) include the ingest of drop-down menus for place navigation and browser-specific tips for users (like in my housing above). I’m evenhandedly certain that the Google programmers ready refining their engine so that the more common ingest of CSS to hide book for inoffensive purposes same navigation menus (and so on) are constituted as benign, but if you are most to ingest unseeable book for whatever fancy design gimmick on your page, you strength poverty to test it out on whatever fog tender on your place to see if the Google mechanism chokes on it. After all, always remember your site’s life depends on a robot, not a human. It may be obvious to you and another humans that the code is harmless, fashioned for whatever unexceptionable purpose, but a computer program crapper exclusive follow a set of pre-programmed rules.