Lazy SEO

[EricChaffey]

I have talked to a few people that have recently paid SEO companies to optimize their website and I have noticed similar techniques used that I am unsure are black, white or grey hat. The site is basically one big image, possibly a menu, but all the wording is within the images. The text in the images, and sometimes more, is in the sourcecode but are hidden in many ways from the page. The sites seem to do ok when improving placement, but could they eventually get slapped by the engines?

I found one site that uses this technique but they have a link to a text only version of the page. I know this is/was common practice for flash sites, before Google started indexing flash. I think I am going to test this for shots n tickles.

I see the practicality of doing this. The site will always look the same in the many browsers, your site should pass w3c validation no problem and you can put together the pages in a couple hours.

Does anyone have experience with these types of sites? How well they perform, if you know of a site that has gotten slapped, etc.

Thanks!

Eric

[JohnW]

do you mean the text in the source code is in the image alt? or is it text that is positioned "under" the image, i.e if you disable images do you see the text and if so, are the words the exact same content that you would see when viewing the images?

[EricChaffey]

do you mean the text in the source code is in the image alt? or is it text that is positioned "under" the image, i.e if you disable images do you see the text and if so, are the words the exact same content that you would see when viewing the images?

Alt text is always the main keyword. The hidden text is usually either in an invisible div or span or in div's placed off the visible page.

[JohnW]

>The hidden text is usually either in an invisible div or span or in div's placed off the visible page.

sounds like classic hidden text.

see this
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353

[rapidvectorseo]

I seen many sites currenly using it, use of ALT text is good practice but to use hidden text will definately slap you especially, Google.
I am not sure about using DIV tag to accomodate text but I can see it as Grey hat...better to show content and get well ranked.

[EricChaffey]

I just picked up a client that "spent a lot of money" on this new "SEO friendly" website. I deal primarily with PPC and know the basics of SEO and this site rang alarms immediately. I don't think I will win a redesign argument, until his site gets banned, so I am hoping for something quick & dirty to temporarily dodge the slap.

I know it's hidden text but will Google slap the site if the hidden text matches the content on the images? Google says they slap sites that "present information to search engines differently than to visitors". This isn't a malicious attempt to trick the engines, but I don't think it matters; rules are rules.

So, without having to do a complete redesign, is there anything that can be done easily to make it closer to white hat? A couple things could be adding a link to a text only version of the page or putting the text in a collapsible div somewhere on the page that is easily accessible to visitors. But no matter what, make the same text accessible to a human visitor as well as spiders.

Thanks again!

[beu]

I know it's hidden text but will Google slap the site if the hidden text matches the content on the images?

Sounds like you're talking about a Flash site using SWFObject which is a JavaScript used to present text to user-agents without Flash and JavaScript enabled?

Google doesn't suggest this as a best practice but if content in Flash and underlying (X)HTML MATCH it's OK in most cases.

Note that Google ignores #anchors in URLs, crawls textual content in Flash as long as that text resides within the Flash file and supports simple JavaScript like SWFObject. At this point it's hard to predict which (Flash/Text) version Google will index.....

[EricChaffey]

Nope, not flash. It's one big jpg. They basically used the Photoshoped mockup of the pages, made the body of every page a single large jpg and threw it under the menu. Then they copied all the text for the page and put it in a div positioned at {top: -5000px}. I really wish it was flash...

[beu]

Nope, not flash. It's one big jpg.Hidden text with a jpg seems quite risky. You can use a hidden div with Flash because the ALT attribute really isn't an option. Since ALT is the proper way to provide alternative textual content for jpgs engines may detect using hidden text instead as something bad even if text matches.....

Personally I wouldn't risk it because you are the one who could get blamed if engines take action! Just my two cents....