9. Hidden Links and Hidden Text

Hidden text is text that is made invisible on a website for the sole purpose to mislead search engines to see a content rich page, whilst the human visitor is only seeing images or a flash animation for example. The text is either made invisible by using same page and text colour or by use of CSS spam (see above). Why anybody is trying to hide text or links away from human visitors is totally beyond my mind. Mostly these are spammy, keyword stuffed text passages with the sole purpose to achieve a better search engine placement for selected keywords. It is, to put it simple, cheating. And search engines are treating it as is. At least after the Google Jagger update these tricks are detected and tracked down with very high precision. And I think this is a very good thing, because it was never good to give these spammers and cheaters any advantage over honest, content rich pages, that where not using these methods.

Solution:
Just don´t do it! Build useful, content rich, unique and relevant websites with are worth visiting for both, search engine spiders and robots. Avoid use of flash or image entry pages as long as you have no very good reason to do so. If you have already used invisible text or links, delete it, or even better, rewrite it to good, honest content and make it visible to your visitors. Put your main keywords into a headline or bulleted list, instead of unnaturally repeating them again and again. The search engines will love your site for this and will most probably rate it higher. Be quick, because once you fetch a penalty for your hidden text or hidden links, it is very difficult and will take long time to get the page back into the search engine result pages again!