Hidden text is an SEO strategy that was widely used by web designers to get high search result rankings. Hidden text or invisible text is a text containing certain keywords which help in gaining high rank on the search result pages but is not visible to the human eye on the website. Links to other websites which, in turn, link back to the page for which a high ranking is sought also make for hidden texts. Although, hidden text is invisible to the browser and the user, it is still in the body of the content and is crawled by the search engine spider. Thus, hidden text spams the search engine to obtain better ranking for the website. This is also known as content cloaking.

However, the search engines such as Google have become more sophisticated and can now detect hidden text. Thus, this SEO tactic is no longer effective. On the contrary, using hidden text can cause the search engine to permanently ban the website.

Hidden text should be avoided by SEO web designers. These are the various methods to create hidden text which must be remembered to avoid creating hidden text even by mistake.

Colour matching

This method of creating hidden text matches the colour of the font with the background colour. Background images matching the font colour can also be used to create hidden text. Modern search engines are able to detect colour matching.

Noscript tags

Noscript tags cloak the text in tag which is displayed only when the browser does not view scripts. This method to hide text does improve search result ranking even though the text hidden in noscript tags have lesser value as compared to conventional text.

Div to hide text

Div is used to create menus but spammers use Div as an SEO tool to hide text.

Text can be hidden by putting it in the division and then setting the Div style to display none. This will hide the Div and the text contained in it. The command is as follows.

<div style=”display: none”>This is hidden text</div>

It is harder to detect because multiple style sheets are used. The hidden text can also not be detected by highlighting the page.

Division can also be used to hide the text from the user and browser by using Position function. Absolute positioning can be used to place the text at a certain position located a number of pixels away to the left of the window. Example of the command is as follows.

<div style=”position: absolute; left: -500px”>hidden text</div>

This command will position the text -500 pixels to the left which will hide it because the browser will not be able to view this region.

Visibility can also be set to hidden so that the browser is not able to view the text. The command is as follows.

<div style=”visibility: hidden”>hidden text</div>

Final words on hidden text

Hidden text is a search spam and search engines have developed ways to detect hidden text. Thus, it is better to avoid this tactic of spamming the search engines and utilize legitimate SEO techniques to achieve higher rankings.