[BNM] SEO & display:none and getting banned on Google

[Paul Silver]

On Mon, 2 Oct 2006 11:47:56 +0100, "Tom Coady" said:
> On 10/2/06, Jim H. wrote:
> >
> > Then maybe, block the robots.txt from those files.
> No idea if this would trigger banning/ignoring in indexes, but if I
> wanted
> to purge dodgy seo I'd say this would also be too easy to implement in
> the algorithms: css in robots.txt = suspect!
> 
> OTOH positioning text off page must be quite hard to filter out if you
> don't have amazon turk or something to see if the text is really not 
> visible..

The basic methods of hiding content using CSS are easy to detect - you
just look for large values in left/right positionings, or display:none
and variants. The problem would be deciding whether it was being used
legitimately as part of the design - i.e. hiding content until it's
exposed using an event, or whether it's being done for dodgy reasons.
They'd probably use several weighting factors in this account: hiding
content + content seems to be keyword stuffed = penalisation, or
flagging for human to check.

You could probably write some very turgid Javascript to do the hiding
which would be difficult for the search engines to automatically parse
and realise what you were doing, but most of the low-level blackhat
people won't do this until someone makes it easy for them. (NB: You
could also write some elegant JS to do it, but I'd see that as more
likely to get easily parsed and noticed by the search engines when
people start doing it a lot.)

Cheers

Paul
-- 
  Paul Silver
  http://www.paulsilver.co.uk
  http://www.tenpastmidnight.com