Today I was looking at some affiliate sites and I ran across something that really hurt my brain…hidden SEO text on a page.

That’s right folks, someone in the year 2007 is still stuffing keywords into their website using a font color that is the same as the background color of their page. Here is a screen shot of what the “hidden” text looks like normally:

And this is what happens when you highlight that section of the page:

Here’s the deal. Hiding text is a bad idea. Why? Google hates hidden text…it’s like a huge tip-off that you are trying to trick them. If for some reason your site pops up on their radar screen, you have a good chance of getting banned.

Also, a bunch of keywords smashed together on a page is not an effective way to rank for those keywords anymore. Google looks for natural looking text. Having row after row of comma separated keywords is not going to impress their ranking algorithm.

I know this from personal experience. A recent push of our insurance agent focused website ended up with the word “lead” on it something like 18 times (long story), when the prior version had used the word “lead” two or thee times. When the new site was indexed we almost immediately lost our rankings for keywords like “auto insurance leads,” “insurance leads” and things of that sort. Once we changed the text back into a less “stuffed” form, we saw a relatively quick recovery in our rankings.

The point - even non-hidden keyword stuffing is bad and can hurt you.

So, what would I do if I was the site with the hidden text? After removing the hidden text I’d take the list of keywords they are hiding and create a new quality content page for each group of related keywords, and then link to those pages through a site map and link between related pages throughout the site. Then I would look to get some targeted deep links to those pages from good sites.

By doing so the site will improve its rankings for the targeted keywords and protect itself from the wrath of Google.

So fair reader, if you own a site or sites that are still hiding text, please stop. The tactic is old and truly not worth it.