Although this wasn’t our initial intention, it became an integral part of our homepage design. We purposely make some of our content not visible to encourage more clicks and for the users to spend a longer time on the website. What we’re using is a tactic that improves dwell time, pageviews, sessions, etc. Even for some of our landing pages, there are instances where we use a type of hidden text.ĭon’t misunderstand, we’re not using the spammy kind of hidden text.

The reason why I’m writing this article is because the SEO Hacker blog uses some type of hidden text. Strategies Making Use of Hidden Text for SEO But the tactic isn’t applicable today since the algorithms have evolved to a much more complex and concept-focused approach than the simple and text-focused approach it used to take. It’s a simple act of deception that usually works if done properly. Hidden text is one of the more famous ones. Since the algorithm was very simple and straightforward back then, a lot of black-hat strategies came into fruition during that time. The reasoning behind this is because spammers and black-hat SEOs intended to take advantage of the simple ranking algorithm back in the day where they would create content meant to convert the users while serving a keyword-heavy and stuffed piece of content for the crawlers in hopes of making their page rank better. Hidden text means that a webmaster intentionally hid text that isn’t visible for the visitors but crawlers could view it as being the actual content of the page. The latter being a great practice that could take your SEO to new heights. However, there are fine lines between spammy hidden text and hidden text meant to improve the experience of the users inside your site. Since times have changed, Google has multiple algorithms and security checks in place to make sure that websites making use of this spammy tactic get penalized as soon as possible. This is a very old technique that was abused a few years back. It makes use of methods to primarily deceive the crawlers to hopefully make a page rank better. Hidden text is widely known to be a black-hat practice hated by Google simply because it’s spammy and manipulative.

How to show hidden text on forums