Locating the text outside the user screen using z-index, absolute position class or margin property.Adding the text behind the images or other multimedia files.Changing the text font colour as similar to the page background colour.There are various ways available to manipulate search engine ranking by hiding text on a webpage and here are some hidden text strategies which violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines: Currently, this method will cause serious trouble if search bots detect the hidden text inside the website. Hiding text is a form of content spamming used to improve the on-page SEO ranking signals of the website.īack in the day, these strategies increased web page optimization score when webmasters stuffed the webpage content with targeted keywords and hide it from the users. Hidden text is those which are completely invisible to users on the web page but can be crawled by search engine spiders. Search Engines will crawl hidden links and text in the webpage and for some amount of time this strategy worked to boost page ranking.īut that’s not the case now, search engine ranking algorithms are way more sophisticated and can easily identify illegal strategies which might result in penalization of the website.
This technique is also referred to as content cloaking – “process of displaying a different set of content or links to search engines and site audience“. As time passed by search engines had become more accurate and adjusted their ranking signals to deliver relevant search results. In the early 2000s, due to loopholes in the search engines algorithms, you could hide text or links in the webpage content in an effort to gain a higher ranking in SERPs. If you are considering hidden links and text will increase your website traffic, then soon you will discover this strategy is ineffective and might penalize your website. Hiding text and links is one of the oldest black hat techniques used to boost page ranking in search results.