Black-hat SEO?

[bojans]

I am wondering about CMSMS menus and class accessibility - with CSS position absolute we put it on top (unvisible) part of page.
I am reading around the about seo blackhat - almost all of seo sites warning that this method IS seo blackhat.

What do you think abouth this? Have some one negative expirience with this?
Should we remove this class?

Thanks!

Bojan

[nhaack]

Hi Bojans,

I do not know it per definition, but here are my 5 cent. I know of some bigger brands that hide specific elements that way. Eg. they have rendered true type fonts and include the text as hidden headlines next to the image with visibility and display. I think that can be more or less rated the same technique as the accessibility class.

Personally, I do not believe that your content will be excluded for that. However, you shouldn't over-do it with hidden elements (e.g. to push keywords/keyphrases to an abnormal density like way above 3-4%). As long as your relevant content is visible and not cloaked or something, you should be fine. If you hide stuff that is totally out of context, I would be more cautious though.

Search Engine are a bit like users. They look for relevant, quality content. If you can help them with a sprinkle of extra information, they will gladly accept your help. If you try to fool them, they will turn away.

Actually, accessibility and SEO are not that far away from each other in terms of document structure.

Best
Nils

[bojans]

Thanks Nils,

I agree with you that this class is actually seo friendly and not black hat. But I just wonder if search engine will understand this or they'll punish you.
For me this is a good way to show content for mobile phone browsers, because navigation is display first.
I am not puting anything else in this (or any other) class for search optimisation. In these days I read a lot about search optimisation and I want to talk about here, because most of my pages is made by cmsms.

Bojan

[sara_criss]

i am also agree with u Nils

[nhaack]

Here is some additional reading on the topic:

1. Hidden text and links (google FAQ)
2. SE Roundtable: Google Allows Some Cases of Hiding Text with CSS
3. http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200510/google_seo_and_using_css_to_hide_text/
4. CSS in Action: Invisible Content Just for Screen Reader Users

Best
Nils

[sara_criss]

one more question nils ....is it possible that google will ban site coz of this .....

[nhaack]

I do the same for hiding specific and tags from the user with css. So far it hasn't hurt. But I do not try dirty tricks here and only use it 3 times on each page. It basically contains text like "sidebar elements of domain.com" or such.

I recently read another article about this... I just forgot to bookmark it (damn). It was exactly about this topic. It explained a few things which were shortly this (from memory):

"... Let's say you have a page about cheesecake... and all your hidden elements contain chocolate cake. So now your page also ranks for chocolate cake even though this is not what you present to the regular visitor. This is evil so you might eventually have your pages excluded (banned). However, Google might not notice it and your site will only get banned if someone reports it to Google... "

It really depends on what you do (I think). It is not that search engines decide between good and evil, but they become better and better to know what is tricky bad stuff.

Do you have an example that you are concerned about?

Best
Nils