Hidden Text

Hidden texts

A hidden text is the textual content in web pages which the visitors cannot see but is still readable by the search engines. Hidden text is also identified as invisible text or fake text. The main purpose of the hidden text is to load a Web page with keywords and the keyword phrases that would be invisible to visitors but help in improving the page's rankings in the search engine results. Hidden text is most commonly done by setting the font color of the text to be the same as the background color and visible unless the user highlights it. Hidden text is considered as search spam by each of the major search engines. It is considered as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors.

Hidden Text or Links such as excessive keywords can be hidden in numerous ways, including:

• Using white color font text on a white background
• Text behind an image
• Using CSS to hide text using CSS
• Reducing the font size to 0

Hidden Links

The intention behind the hidden links is to be crawled by Googlebot, but they are unreadable to humans because:

• The link is in hidden text form (for example, the text color and background color are identical).
• Tiny hyperlinks are made with the help of CSS as little as one pixel high.
• The link is cloaked in a small character for example a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph.

Hidden text or hidden links are also used by websites as a spamdexing technique to fill a page with keywords that a search engine will recognize but are not visible to a visitor. Moreover Google has taken steps to prevent this by checking the color of text as it indexes the web page and read-through to see if it is similar to the colour as the background, if it is found it gives those pages much lower rankings.

One should not use hidden text to get high ranking in any search engines. This technique must be avoided because by hiding keywords in hidden text, it may be able to trick the search engines for a limited amount of time. But when identified can cause search engines to permanently ban the website.

As the spammers are continue to use hidden text to stuff keywords into their pages for purposes of artificially boosting their rankings. So nowadays hidden Text is one of the challenges faced by webmasters and search engines.

Ultimately, this technique must be avoided Too much of any good thing always turns into a very bad thing. So it must be used in commonly ways.