Hidden Text And/or Keyword Stuffing

>>Matt: Hi everybody. This is Matt. >>Nelson: And I'm Nelson. >>Matt: And we wanted to talk to you a little bit today about hidden text and keyword stuffing. So, what does it mean if you get a message like this in Google's free Webmaster Tools? The Webmaster console basically says "In our opinion, your site has hidden text or keyword stuffing." Now luckily this is a relatively straightforward thing. But let's walk through it just so people have the context. So how would you describe hidden text? >>Nelson: Hidden text is text that's visible to computers or search engines but not necessarily visible to users. >>Matt: Mm-hm. >>Nelson: So it could be white text on a white background and sometimes we see sites using CSS to mark the visibility of the text to "hidden" or to even move it completely off the page. >>Matt: Yep. Absolutely. And just to be clear. Like, there are some frameworks that will have JavaScript where the text becomes visible after you mouse over. And stuff like that. As long as you're doing a normal sort of idiom, that's typically OK. What we're talking about is, you'll have a paragraph at the bottom of the page that's full of key words. Or something like that. Things that you wanna rank for, but unless the users see the content on the page, they don't know whether they can stay on the page. Whether it's really the content that they're looking for. OK, so hidden text is one. The other one is keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is almost like a grab bag term to describe a lot of different things. You can be repeating a lot of the same words over and over again. "Payday loans, payday loans, payday loans." You can use different words, you know. So you're talking about "Free credit cards." "Credit cards." "Weight loss pill." You know. All sorts of stuff it can even be almost gibberish like. So, if you're using a program to autogenerate stuff. And you're making things that are like, don't make any sense whatsoever. Maybe you've got a spinning program and it spins really badly. Maybe you've got a Markov model program. You paid 99 dollars to somebody, and you know, it's just throwing all sorts of keywords out there. But if a regular person reading it would say, "This doesn't really make sense. It doesn't hold together." Then that's likely to be something that we would consider keyword stuffing. OK. So, you've gotten this message. You know what hidden text is. You know what keyword stuffing is. So how do you correct it? What would you do, Nelson? >>Nelson: Yeah, it's pretty simple. Just find the hidden text or the keyword stuffing and remove it. >>Matt: Mm-hm. Yeah. And there's a lot, you know, you can "control A." You can "view the source." It's possible, in theory, that you got hacked. But most of the time if you get this message either you or your Webmaster or your SEO agency will know actually. "Yeah, OK. We tried to embed these words here." Or "We autogenerated a bunch of these words on this page." And so if you get this message you should know what was going on. So fix it by removing it. And then the second aspect is to document it. So we need to know not only that the issue's been corrected. But hopefully that there's a good faith effort that it won't happen again in the future. So any context, how did it happen? How do you know that it won't happen again? Was it a CMS project that, content management system, that went crazy? Or was it someone that thought he was trying to help but, of course, wasn't actually helping? Any of that sort of stuff to help us understand how the text got there, and what you're doing so that the text won't be there in the future really helps us to make that reconsideration request. Anything we've forgotten? >>Nelson: No. I think we're good. >>Matt: OK. It's a relatively straightforward thing. I know it's stressful to get these messages but we're trying to figure out what's the best user experience. And if a user lands on the page and they don't see the words that they were searching for, that's a really bad user experience. And likewise if they land on a page, and they figure out "Oh, this was just nonsense text." Then they get angry. They complain. They're unhappy. And so it's in everybody's best interests if your pages are returned and users come to your page because it really does have the content that you promised. That you offered to people. So if you get this message, just remove the keyword stuffing. Remove the hidden text. Do a reconsideration request and hopefully you should be in pretty good shape.