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

[delarge]

Thanks people - I am meeting the gippo agency that did this for us tomorrow
and I am going to be telling them off for a variety of things, this being
one of them, but wanted to check before I went in saying it was crude and a
pile of p00.

It seems general jist is that this is not only useless, but risky, and as
was said before on this list - just write a decent descriptive title and
show it!




On 10/2/06, Paul Silver <paul at tenpastmidnight.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
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Paul Burgess

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