Google guidelines against modern web development?
- Author: Olaf
- Filed under: Google, SEO
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 (zero)
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?
Related posts
- RSS feed for comments on this post
11 Responses for "Google guidelines against modern web development?"
Categories
Latest Posts
- Create custom backups from your website using cURL
- 4th of July Lottery from TemplateMonster.com
- Impressions from the Google I/0 conference
- More advanced features in phpMyAdmin
- Database Management with phpMyAdmin
- Website layout dimensions today
- Optimizing your Wordpress Blog for Google: Part 2
- Easy payments using Paypal IPN
- Optimizing your Wordpress Blog for Google: Part 1
- Using Wordpress widgets for an improved blogging experience
Meta
Top Commentators
- corbyboy (1)
- ehcomunicacion (1)
- Ashley (1)
- Gurpreet Singh (1)
Recent Comments
- Olaf: ...oeps, I forgot to upload the file. It's
- Gurpreet Singh: The link to the zip file id not
- Olaf: @corbyboy, you're absolutely right, bad enough that the php
- corbyboy: Great article. In my opinion, cURL is one of
- Ashley: Great post. I am researching more about link
- Olaf: Yes right, this hard to do, try to
- ehcomunicacion: i have problems with pages made by Adobe
- Realizar backups desde cURL : Notitodo: [...] Create custom backups from your website using
- Olaf: Yes sure, next year there will be the
- PLR Website Graphics: That sounds (& looks) like an awesome event
You are right. I guess the only way to prevent this is by using AJAX requests instead of hidden text.
…yes right, not using them is always possible
Would you use an XML request for some explaining text box which will show up onMouseOver?
Got your point. I wouldn’t do that but in many cases you can
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)
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..
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.
True-you are right,I am with your view.Hiding text is only furnishing glamour to sites…
I think google should employ human evaluators on their suspected sites
Who says they don’t?
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.
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.