RSS Feeds: What Google Considers Hidden Text and Links (Cloaking)
This actually a follow-up to my "lesson on surreptitiousness" and a more formal response to a comment by Hari of Hari's Corner. Hari said "…any content that is hidden from readers but available to search engine crawlers is considered "cloaking" by google according to their ToS and would be considered spamming their search engine."
What Google's ToS Actually Says
I extracted the relevant text. My article didn't say to do any of these things:
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
Hidden links are links that are intended to be crawled by Googlebot, but are unreadable to humans because:
- The link consists of hidden text (for example, the text color and background color are identical).
- CSS has been used to make tiny hyperlinks, as little as one pixel high.
- The link is hidden in a small character – for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph.
If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.
There's more information at the Webmaster Help Center, under "Hidden text and links" in case you want to read the whole thing for yourself.
It's About Accessibility and Perception
I'm not advocating hiding text and links the way Google describes. Making links look like ordinary text still makes the links accessible by plain text browsers, screen readers and anyone who turns CSS off in their browser. Doing it any other way is considered cloaking and used for things like keyword stuffing or presenting different text to the search engines than what's presented to the readers.
Perception is a pretty strong reason, however, to avoid hiding any links at all. What you and I may perceive as something legitimate may not be perceived by others in quite the same light. For that very reason, I advise extreme caution even when doing it the legitimate way. If you're planning to do it for a specific purpose, try to make it temporary.
I have some links that look like plain text in place and they're only there like that until the search engines completely index my new niche blogs. Once the indexing has taken place and the posts appear in search results, I plan to change them back into regular links or remove the links altogether.
Another good reason, as Steve of Pinnacle Trade Show Displays pointed out, to do links like this in the first place is to prevent competitors from seeing your anchor text. Once the anchor text has done its job, however, it would be advisable to turn the links back into regular links. Never give the competition any edge, even if that edge is reporting spam using undecorated links as an excuse.
Conclusion
When in doubt, don't do it. I've done it and others have done it, but you need to make sure you use your own judgment as to what's right and what's wrong.
Do you really think you'd get penalized for not decorating your links with different colors or underlines? Are links always meant to be clicked? I submit that links are used for indexing way more than clicking, even though they were never originally intended to be used that way.
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Hi RT, thanks for the nod. I read a great post a while back comparing being on page one on google to the Sword of Damocles. Now I can't find it. Anyway, there are supposedly "white hat" (OK), "black hat" (not OK), and "gray hat" (depends on the meaning of "is"…) methods. I think this falls in the white/gray area.
I think there are "legitimate" reasons for doing it, and the text is visible. It's not like one is trying to hide the words. I think if anything the link would be ignored, not penalized. However, due to the sword it may be best to avoid. Steve
One way I've done this and it works is to look clueless.
You create a HTML page with your links in a hidden DIV and add Javascript that would cause the hidden text to display if it didn't have a bug in it. The text does have to look legit enough to pass a visual source inspection, of course.
The icing on the cake is to add meta tags that indicate the page was created using Microsoft FrontPage. Nothing says "web design noob" better than that. :lol:
Your page looks like a really badly coded page by a cut-n-paste noob web designer and not anything spammy.
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What's wrong with Frontpage? It's the coolest ever! I want to use Frontpage to create my Geocities website… haha
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Hey! I use FP, and an old version of it to boot :mad: . You can call me a boob, but don't call me a noob. By the way, I don't think the Gbot makes exceptions for noobs.
Actually Google will give you a cluelessness break, sometimes. It just depends on what it looks like and where it's at. If you did this kind of trick on a fancy Flash website on its own domain with other obvious SEO methods in effect, SLAP! But using FrontPage on GeoCities obviously indicates to GoogleBot that you have no idea about proper web design so you get a break. :lol:
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Frank, I can tell you from personal experience (accident) that Google does have a deep-crawl bot that reads browser generated languages like CSS and Javascript, and will penalize hidden links in any such form.
I had to beg for forgiveness…. and this was about 2 years ago…. I'm sure their detection has improved.
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I had the opposite experience Beth.
I had some sites that had a tab like interface where some of the tabs would never become visible. There was never any penalty applied to them and they had that Javascript for 3 years, roughly 2003 through 2006. Maybe there was something I did that made the 'bot accept it, I don't know.
I also know that it's rare for Google to penalize WordPress sites for hidden links added by some plugins and ad widgets. Instead, they just discount or ignore the link.
I think it probably depends on the links in question and what the intention of the hiding seems to be.
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:grin: A tool noob question here .. if I may ask, how do you really know if Google penalized your site? and for what particular reason? Trial and error? Thanks.
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It's easy to spot. The first that happens is your PageRank drops. If you use Firefox and the SearchStatus plugin, you can't help but notice.
The reason isn't always obvious, but since it's your blog, you should be the first to know why.
Thanks for the tip on the SearchStatus plugin. Didn't know about that.
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Yes, RT. Thanks for the clarification.
In this case, the links are not hidden but de-emphasized as you mentioned. There's technically nothing wrong with de-emphasizing links, but it does make for bad web design although it has its uses (like the ones you mentioned).
De-emphasized links are better than having plain text underlined without a link.
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I didn't think about that. I've come across words that are underlined for emphasis. I think that's why most people use strong instead.
Why would it be necessary to hide links from your competitors?
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For two reasons: 1) So they don't use the same anchor for themselves and 2) So they don't "Google Bomb" your site. Now go ahead and ask me what "Google Bomb" is.
So they don't use the same anchor text for themselves? Good thought. I did that when I was trying to get my site off the ground. Not much, but I got a little.
Hmmmm, I had a thought. Do you happen to know what Google Bombing is? :smile:
Do you already know, or are you just screwing with me? :razz:
It was a new term but I read Wikipidia's entry. I now know everything they do. :shock:
Brent,
You asked "Why would it be necessary to hide links from your competitors?"
It really only applies if you're livelyhood (food on the table, etc.) is dependent on the link.
Let's say you sell boxers. Lots of other people sell boxers too. Its a dog fight to rank high on boxers. Now let's say you get a new design with "Caution: TNT inside. Handle with Care." or something like that on it (I'm not feeling very creative today). It starts to sell, and then Johnny Depp wears them on Oprah. Your sales really take off. When you search the big G for "TNT boxers" though, you and your competitors are nowhere to be found. You create a page "TNT boxers" and get links to it. Suddenly it's getting more traffic than your homepage, your sales are through the roof for these boxers, and you're planning what size yacht to buy. Your boxer-selling competitors haven't caught on yet…
Do you really want a big obvious link screaming "TNT BOXERS!" on your homepage going to a page optimized for TNT boxers?
Now, granted the chances of your competitors really understanding the importance of keywords, research, niches, and such are small, but for us paranoid people, sometimes we like to keep our livelyhood and our links under the radar…
I am not advocating using cloaking. But if you are gona use cloaked links don't set the background colour to the same colour as the link. Google can pick that up easily. Use a background image, and use multiple colours in the image.
There is another kind of cloaking, basically you use a program to tell if the thing looking at the page is human or not, if it's google's bot you serve up different content than you do to humans.
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RT Im not smart enough to even consider it, but i know it happens everyday, call me chicken but Ive learned not to play Google games
What I'm talking about isn't Google games. It's just de-emphasis in order to embed links that casual observers will easily ignore. It has a specific purpose and that purpose isn't to cheat in the SERPS, which is what Google is all against.
My friend accidentally hid a header tag behind an image, and he got penalized for it. That's the first time I've ever heard of accidental cloaking!
You see, he was trying to get the header to go in front of the image, but he couldn't do it, and then he just forgot about it.
I'm really not understanding where cloaking is a bad thing… I view it as a marketing technique, not a scam.
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