A Novel Approach to Hidden Text
I just came across quite a novel black hat approach to hidden text which has been put together by these guys: http://www.knowledge.co.uk. Its a hidden text, link farm combo which actually seems to work but it's very high risk and once the house of cards comes tumbling down I really wouldn't want to be in their shoes.
Here's how it works: Firstly, every web site they design for their customers comes with a links page, which has links, not to their customers' customers or other relevant websites, but to Knowledge's own other web site design customers. I.e. they interlink all their customers' websites and accrue relevance and Page Rank that way, while simultanously advertising their own services by flaunting their customer list. Secondly, these links pages come complete with hidden text in decent semantic markup which pushes up their onsite relevance. You can find an example if you look at the source code of this page: http://www.aquakleen.org/customers.php
So, if it works why not? Well here's why; if Knowledge get reported or caught then every single one of their customers' inbound links potentially goes down the tube in one fell swoop. Now Google might just take a sympathetic view, if they do a manual check since none of these companies probably has much understanding of what is going on and its not their fault. However, they might at the very least be punished by some sort of demotion or by the removal of these links pages from Google's index, which would in itself bring the whole thing crashing down since many of the web sites in question seem to be relying wholy on these links pages for their inbounds and some of the links pages even seem to be the best performing pages.
To be fair, I'm not even sure that Knowledge know what they are doing since some of the hidden words I found weren't even keywords; although the vast majority of them were.
Google honestly isn't doing such a good job of picking this up in this instance, since a hidden text string on the Aquakleen links page is even displaying in Google's results description. So not only are they allowing hidden text, they are displaying it in the SERPs.
Anyway, enough for today - co-opting your customers into a link farm and then inflicting hidden text on them is just shoddy. Knowledge, did you explain the risks to your customers before you did this?
Stumble It!
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3 comments:
Whaoah.. I never heard about "hidden texts" but I think it is called Black SEo.. I think it's not good especially once Google found about it ;0
Thanks for sharing anyway. See you around.
Is there any bad thing about black SEO? I think a lot are using this technique and I really appreciate your view about this.
Hi Sassy,
thanks for dropping by.
There are two ways of looking at this.
1) bad in terms of risk. If you get caught then there are penalties to pay if you get caught and if you rely on your website for your income then the risk generally isn't worth it.
2) bad in terms of ethics. This is a grey area. Some black hat techniques are unquestionably unethical, others just go against the grain of the way the search engines want to be served up their information, and exploit loopholes in the system. The second would be mre accurately called grey Hat.
There is also the issue, especially in this instance here, that the quality of information provided to web site visitors is affected detrimentally by such techniques. I.e I might find this website looking for the products and services this company offers and all that I find is a list of links to unrelated websites. This is because the only text on the web page in question that is relevant to the products and services is hidden.
In fact, there was actually no need to hide this relevant text if they had thought about working it in to the content of the page properly. I'd say its a general rule of web design and putting together search engine friendly pages that if you try to do something clever, you often end up doing something quite dumb.
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