A very little knowledge is a dangerous thing

[tdol]

I have been reading, with great interest and greater ignorance, through a lot on this forum because my webmaster tells me I should be better informed about SEO, etc. One thing you all seem to agree on is that hidden words are an abomination to Google.

Part of our website is a forum and we sometimes use hidden text as a way of giving answers to questions (we have an educational site). We have polls and then posts with the answers in 'invisible ink' so that students can highlight and check their answers. This is the only area of the site where we do this, and it would only represent a tiny proportion of our content. However, given the number of times I have seen people talking about the evils of hidden text, would it be prudent for us to find another way of giving the answers to such a poll?

Many thanks. :)

[alias420]

Just dont index those pages if they are really just a tiny section of the site then tell robots.txt to not crawl/index those pages you will of course be losing any unique content on those pages and any rankings they have but possibly saving the rest of your site. Google likes to use automated tools so I doubt their bot will be able to see that you are not spamming.

[NFFC]

>would it be prudent for us to find another way of giving the answers to such a poll?

I think there are better and more elegant ways.

>hidden words are an abomination to Google.

I'm sure they are non too keen about them but there are millions of pages in their index that use "hidden" text. I don't think it is a huge prority, much of the stuff you hear is just Google trying to get webmasters to self police themselves. Apart from that using hidden text as an SEO stratagy [which you are not] is pretty lame, although some of the drivel that is touted as unique content would be better as hidden text :)

You are better placed that Google to judge the detailed functioning of your website and its interaction with your users, go with what you believe is best.

[tdol]

Thank you very much. In terms of proportion, the forum has sixty thousand odd posts and the offenders probably represent fifty to a hundred. With that proportion is there a cause for concern?

I can easily substitute the invisible ink for a scroll-down-to-the-answer at the very bottom of the page approach, which would probably be easier for me than dealing with robots files. I'll do that in futurw, but do i need to worry about old posts? Again, thanks for your time.

[DaveN]

scroll-down-to-the-answer at the very bottom of the page......

No thats where the spammers do all there keyword stuffing :)


honestly don't worry... if in doubt put it in a javascript pop-up

DaveN

[tdol]

Thanks for the advice. I'll sleep soundly again.

[Dominic]

Props for learning more about seo. That's great advice and hope you enjoy the experience.

I'm a Social Worker and started a non-profit organisation (for homeless people) with a software developer who had been working on the streets with me as a volunteer.

When it came to doing our website he said 'here is the software, learn how to use it and diy if you want one, I hate the things.'

Which sent me into the realm of seo. There is so much info available for free from industry leaders which is odd if you think about it.

Anyway, since then I've been able to learn the tricks of the trade and we make some really nice bank for our work with homeless people as a result. Plus it's a great outlet for me to de-stress at the end of the day.

So would really encourage you if you are interested to keep reading and asking questions, especially here, you wouldn't even imagine the consultancy fees you would need to pay usually to get access to the big guns they have here - and they freely give their insight if you ask a question.

Anyway, best wishes with your website.. and hope you get more and more involved with the management of your site.

[St0n3y]

CSS layering is also a very elegant solution. Sites us it for navigation all the time and its SE friendly.

[tdol]

Thanks again, though I'll have to look into that one in detail first. :)