Hidden Links And Hidden Text
A lot of SEO work is about avoiding the negative impacts of poor or unethical SEO work. If you upset the search engines you can pay the ultimate price of having all of your pages blacklisted and removed from the search engine index. While this may be an extreme outcome and one that is usually only accorded to sites that have intentionally attempted to manipulate the search engines to their own ends, it can happen to some unsuspecting novice SEOs before they really gain an understanding of how the search engines work and what exactly they expect.
Avoiding The Glare Of Search Engines
The use of hidden links and hidden text is a real no-no in the eyes of search engines because they believe, typically correctly, that both these actions are done purely to help with rankings and that it offers no real benefit to visitors. You can't really argue with the decision either, because hidden text and hidden links can offer no genuine value to your readers since they don't see the content.
Using Links And Content
Links and content are the most basic ingredients for SEO success but search engines, like black hat SEOs know that they aren't always used for the doing of good. Hidden text and links, sometimes referred to as being cloaked, are used because they are believed to manipulate the search engines into offering improved results. While they represent two of the quickest methods to get a site banned from search engines they also represent two of the more common practices undertaken by new websites.
Hiding Website Content
The act of hiding content is usually done through offering text of one colour on a background of the same colour. Search engines may also look for content and backgrounds that closely match without completely hiding the content from the human eye. The desired result of this is very similar to completely masking text and so the punishment may well be the same from the search engines. Good SEO requires that you pamper to the requirements of the search engines by providing nothing but great quality content for your visitors.
It's vital to remember that search engines, like you, are aiming to offer their visitors pages filled with excellent quality content. Specifically, they want to reserve the top search positions for those pages that really deserve them and if they see cloaked links or hidden text on a page then they don't believe that the page using them is really geared towards the provision of good quality content for the visitor.
SEO Best Practices Mean Avoiding SEO Worst Practices
SEO doesn't just mean using best practices but avoiding worst practices. There are numerous forms of black hat SEO that you must avoid if you want to enjoy a long lifetime of targeted visitors generated from your high quality SEO content. Good keyword research, proper on page optimisation, and continued off page optimisation or link building will give you these results not using techniques like hidden text and links.
