Example Of Google Penalty Email Over Hidden Text
A DigitalPoint Forum thread has a copy of a email sent to a webmaster for violating Google's webmaster guidelines. The email specifically shows the webmaster which guidelines they are breaking, in this case, hiding text.
Here is a copy of the email:
Dear site owner or webmaster of somewifi.com,While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en.
This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party.
Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.
The following is some example hidden text we found at http://somewifi.com/:
songs Power Of Quest download songs Thomas Newman buy mp3 Tied and Tickled Trio new mp3 AFI top mp3 Alex Lifeson dowland ALO (Animal Liberation Orchestra) instrumental Dark oscillators mp3 songs Distance music download Euskefeurat music download F.J.Haydn download Fair to Midland
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from somewifi.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.
We would prefer to keep your pages in Google's index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-been-hacked-now-what.html. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration.
Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team
Google specifically emailed this webmaster because they thought it was done by a third party, i.e. a hack. Google wrote in the email, "this appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party." Google then informed the webmaster that in order to protect the safety of the Google searcher, they have removed the infected website temporarily.
It is nice to see specific examples of this in real life, so I thought it would be nice to share with you all.
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.
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rustybrick in Google Optimization at July 1, 2009 7:57 AM
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I've recently begun learning SEO. One of the books I'm reading is Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walter. At the beginning of the book (page 18), he seems to recommend hiding text. He's talking about placing the company logo in the top corner of a website....
"A search engine can read the text in the alt attribute but assigns a lower rank to the content than it really deserves. A better approach would be to use the h1 tag. [...He puts the company name and catch phrase in the H1 element and then displays some CSS, including a text-indent: -9999px...]
I've used a general element selector to pinpoint the logo tag since logically we would have only one piece of content that is the most important on the page and deserving of the tag. The text-indent property places the text of the tag 9999 pixels to the left, far out of view for sighted users, but still visible to search engines. With the text out of the way the background property displays the image in place of the text, centering it in the 200px by 200px display area defined by the width and height properties."
Is this bad advice? Would Google view this as duplicitous? I found this very strange when I was reading it in a seemingly official book.
Posted by Patrick at July 1, 2009 17:32