Hidden text

[Freeman]

Is there a way that you can put in text into your index page that google will pick up on a search but people won't be able to see it on the graphical side of things? If thats not clear then ill re write it, thanks for the help, JF

[djr33]

Googlebot is pretty smart. It may see this and ignore it.

However,

1. the <meta> tags were originally used for keywords for search engines. Google has moved beyond this, but it may still work to get some keywords in there.... I'm not sure if google just ignores meta tags now or if it views them in addition to the page's content.

2. I saw a page (horribly designed, but this worked) that had a black background and a bunch of black, tiny, text on it. It wasn't noticable unless you started highlighting parts of it (I was playing with a script that was on the page for a random image thing, so I noticed it).
http://jojo.com by the way.
Make it unnoticable to the viewer, and googlebot won't care what color it is.
However, this looks cheap to anyone who notices it.

3. I wonder if <!-- comments --> are ignored by googlebot... almost surely. however, something like that might work. There's gotta be some way to put some more text in your source code than is displayed, but still have googlebot see it.

4. A complex way would be to use PHP to:
a. determine the browser (googlebot is a browser type, now, it seems)
b. if googlebot, echo (php term for output) more text.
Regular viewers wouldn't see it... would work. But... it would be extremely hard for you to test it because you can't possibly convince your own php page, even, that you are googlebot, so the only way to know if i worked would be to wait til google finds the page, and see the "cached" version they have and what it says.
not a great option... and would be misleading.. the blurb under the google search result would read your 'fake' text, not the real stuff on the page.

Why not just have the text on your page? Don't worry, google will find it. Adding text won't boost your google rating or anything... it's much more complex than that, and partly based on hits through google to your site, I believe.

Also, for images (google image search) be sure you're filling out your alt tags with lots of info:
<img src="pic.jpg" alt="description of the image that googleimagebot* will see">

*actually, yes, a totaly different bot... google's kinda scary

Anyway..... good luck.

[JRS]

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keyword keyword keyword">
Provides keywords for search engines. These are added to the keywords found in the document itself. If you insert a keyword more than seven times here, the whole tag will be ignored!

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="This is a site">
Search engines which support the above tag will now display the text you specify here, rather than the first few lines of text from the actual document when the document shows up in a search result. You have about 1,000 characters for your description, but not all these will be used.

[djr33]

Good call.
Those are good tags to know.


However, there's a catch... does google really go with those? It seems to like it's own methods and just ignores the standards (for the better usually), and it just figures out stuff about sites on its own, kinda.
Does it honor those tags?


EDIT: Seven times!? Especially for google, I'd say don't repeat at all. It bumps spammers down, and I'd be willing to bet it counts that as spam.

[mwinter]

However, there's a catch... does google really go with those [meta elements]?

In general, no. It will use a 'description' if there's nothing better to display in the search results, but the rest it stopped caring about a long time ago. There are simply too many sites that try to fake themselves into relevance.

Mike

[JRS]

Oh, ... the googler <sigh>

If the question is what is the best way for google to find favor with your site so that it gets a wortwhile ranking, my recommendation is to buy a sponsored ad which is likely to be a better investment than going with a Search Engine Optimization company. You know the old story; every SEO company claims to place you in the top 10. That is obviously impossible See http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html.

If the objective is simply to learn more about search engine optimization, then http://www.seochat.com/ is as good a place to start as any.

[ddadmin]

Things like hidden text are typically considered "black hat" SEO, and is a risky game. Google may decide to even ban your site if it suspects you're trying to "fool" the search engines. Personally I've never done any real SEO- just work on the site, and let the search engines make up their own minds what they want to index and how.

[djr33]

That's good advice.

Google bumps you down if they think you spam, and, yeah, might ban you if they think you're trying to trick them.

[Freeman]

How would they be able to tell unless they actually went to your website and looked to see if what waas coming up on google was actually what people could see on your site? Seems like that would take to much of their time. It is a good to get people to come to your site though, even if it might be considered to be not the greatest thing in the world to do.

[mwinter]

How would they be able to tell unless they actually went to your website and looked to see if what waas coming up on google was actually what people could see on your site?

By analysing the content of the site as it's indexed. I don't know the details, but Google's Webmaster information gives clues to what it does (and in some cases, how) throughout that section.

Seems like that would take to much of their time.

With an index of around 8 billion Web pages, what do you think?

It is a good [idea?] to get people to come to your site though

What is?

Mike