Traffic Building

Hidden text is one of the oldest tricks webmasters try to use to fool search engines into ranking their pages higher than they may deserve.

These tactics are designed to show different content to users (who don’t see the text either because it’s hidden in the content (white text on white background for example) or hidden outside the viewable area of the page using CSS) than what is shown to search engine spiders.

Search engines have long been able to detect hidden text within a web page, but many webmasters thought trying to hide text using CSS was “safe” and that search engine spiders have no way to detect this.

But, a recent forum discussion at Cre8asite introduces the possibility that Google is indeed checking included CSS files for rules that could be used to hide text.

The lesson here is that trying to manipulate your natural rankings in search is a losing game.

You’re much better off creating new unique content for your site (what search engines want) than trying to stay one step ahead (and invariably falling behind) the latest technologies search engines are using to index sites.