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Written by Larry Dearing
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Sunday, 20 December 2009 16:20 |
Are you using hidden links and text on our website to push more back links and keyword density into the SEO mix? This may be one of the most reviled of all SEO Black Hat techniques. As with many Black Hat techniques, once identified by search engines this could result in doing much more harm than good. I recently had a reminder of how prevalent the practice is.
The practice itself revolves around hiding key works in certain areas of a website where they cannot be seen. They use same color font and background combinations to appear invisible on the website, though when search engines are crawling the underlying code they pick up on the key words and place value to them. Hiding links is a similar practice cloaking back links to target websites. These hidden links are usually placed in a client's website by an unscrupulous website designer or developer, often linking back to their site.
Obviously this technique is frowned upon by the website builder community, and after the last couple years of search engine algorithm improvement, will ultimately cost you the valuable search engine ranking you've been seeking. Unfortunately in the case of the hidden back links, you may not even know they are there on your website. A few years ago this practice was fairly prominent but had lost a lot of its popularity. I just didn't realize until recently how common an opinion it was that this was a good idea.
We (Web Marietta) had a client that had built their web site with a Mac software package that did not allow for adding meta tags for page title, description, and key words. After we made some suggestions on Mac based programs to upgrade to that would allow this functionality, our customer went off to the local Mac store to discuss the situation. The salesman's opinion was that our client could meet the same objectives with his current website software by simply hiding descriptions and key words by using a font color matching the background.
I do want to point out this is not an indictment against Mac or their sales people. It had nothing to do with Mac. This was simply one salesman's naive opinion on how to get the job done. He obviously thought he was providing value to his customer but illustrated how much bad and even harmful advice there is out there. Of course we where horrified and immediately explained to our client the ramifications of such an idea.
The bottom line to this story is there are a lot of "get ranking quick" schemes out there that actually seem logical and potentially beneficial. When it comes to SEO practices you cannot afford to wear the Black Hat. If you are not sure, simply don't. Ask someone you can depend on for guidance. Even better, ask two. |
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