How do search engines know the different between text and hidden text?
Just wondering because I have some text on a page of my site that I had to hide because of company policies, but all I did was make the text the same color as the background. But I heard that this could lower your search engine ranking when they find out. How do they know?
Hidden by using the same color is only from what the USER sees.
The search engine compares the color CODE of the text to the color code of the background. If they detect that is is the same, they know you are only trying to override their default rating by using the words more than the user actually sees. Too small of letters also trigger rejection by the search engines.
A way around this is to make the keywords in a different color code at the bottom of the web page…that is out of the viewing area of the user.
Related posts:
i dont think you hid the texts at all, at last not rom the search engines. They actual scan the html file with "robots" so once a piece of text is in the file they see it because they dont look at the page through a browser but look it in form of text. However if you want to hide something i recommend you use a hph include if you know php or maybe some other programming language to hide it from the search engines
References :
Hidden by using the same color is only from what the USER sees.
The search engine compares the color CODE of the text to the color code of the background. If they detect that is is the same, they know you are only trying to override their default rating by using the words more than the user actually sees. Too small of letters also trigger rejection by the search engines.
A way around this is to make the keywords in a different color code at the bottom of the web page…that is out of the viewing area of the user.
References :
Years of teaching pc and experience