Google guidelines against modern web development?

Author: Olaf
Filed under: Google, SEO

Friday
Jun 8,2007

Any web developer knows it:

Create websites according the Google’s Webmaster Guidelines!

If you read the current blog post from Google Webmaster Central these Guidelines are not changed. Only the help pages are extended and give more information about each rule.

About the rule “Hidden text and links” there is the following information available:

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. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including: Using white text on a white background, Including text behind an image, Using CSS to hide text, Setting the font size to 0

I know a lot of modern Ajax/JavaScript function are using some text which is hidden by CSS (display:hidden) and upon some event this text (content) becomes visible. This is not some of “Black hat SEO” but just using some JavaScript behavior to create nice and modern effects on a web page.

OK, I didn’t any site which is blacklisted from Google because of this kind of “violation” against the Google quality guidelines but what this clarified rules are the beginning of some new strategy to punish more websites? Remember that bigger sites like from BMW or TemplateMonster got banned because of violating the Google guidelines a few years ago. So what happens next?

11 Responses for "Google guidelines against modern web development?"

Nick June 9th, 2007 at 5:24 am
You are right. I guess the only way to prevent this is by using AJAX requests instead of hidden text.
Olaf June 9th, 2007 at 6:24 am
…yes right, not using them is always possible Would you use an XML request for some explaining text box which will show up onMouseOver?
Nick June 9th, 2007 at 6:27 am
Got your point. I wouldn’t do that but in many cases you can
Olaf June 9th, 2007 at 6:35 am
hehe, according the Google Guidelines is this a kind of Black Hat SEO:

http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/popups/demo.html

(maybe I should warn Eric)
Web Developer June 14th, 2007 at 3:22 am
I think the main purpose of their guidelines is to tell the people to not to hide any text from the visitor, no matter what the technology used to hide the text. Obviously they will not write all the possible ways of hiding text… bottom line is, hiding the text is black hat, not matter how you hide it..
Luke Visinoni June 23rd, 2007 at 10:35 am
So what if you are simply doing something like the following to display an image representing the text?

My website

#my-website {background: url(images/mysite.gif) no-repeat left top;} #my-website span {display:none}
I think it’s kind of silly to punish somebody for this, but then again it must be quite difficult to tell what is blackhat and what isn’t. This is an issue I am always worried about because occasionally I use techniques like this. I learned to do it from CSSZenGarden, and I always thought they knew what they were doing.
johnsons June 28th, 2007 at 1:09 am
True-you are right,I am with your view.Hiding text is only furnishing glamour to sites…
WraithStrider July 17th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
I think google should employ human evaluators on their suspected sites
Luke Visinoni July 18th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Who says they don’t?
Steve July 19th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
I almost always use scripts to show text and links if a plugin isn’t available on the client side. Yes I do make this SEO friendly but it’s hardly fair to get penalised given that I’m not keyword jamming.
mike July 24th, 2007 at 7:20 am
I wish in Scotland we could get developers who can program for the web - rather than wanting to make games, or applets all the time. Every developer I seem to work with now thinks dotnet is great and has never read googles terms and conditions. Spend time training them up more than anything.