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Went Hot: March 27, 2008 - 7:23 pm
Posted By: mike.tekula 44 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: SEO
11 Comments
Went Hot: March 27, 2008 - 7:23 pm
Posted By: mike.tekula 44 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: SEO
11 Comments
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Comments
Ahhhhhh..... it's so refreshing to read an easy-to-digest post like this for a change.
- Eric Itzkowitz
You write:
They might be neat coding tricks, and fun to learn, but they will increase your exposure to potential negative reaction by a search engine.
The truth is, though, that no one seems to know for sure if the SEs are penalizing for using "display:none" in CSS. There is no evidence that I know of....
I think it's a question that shoudn't be asked.
display: none is the work of designers all over the web. It has nothing to do with SEO. I don't know a single SEO who uses display:none with an intent to deceive search engines, so why bring it up for discussion?
Actually, I alluded to that in my bit on disguising text link ads.
Well said John!
Just to know the none value for the display element is :
W3C
And screen reader do not read content in this element except Jaws...
Myself I more going to use the -9999px technique over the span display:none one. There's a big debate over this...
I must admit I have used this tactic for SEO even if only for a short while.
I had a client with a nice looking website. The header was full of great words but they were unfortunatly an image. While we were working on the redesign I did use a class style to make the text I put over the header invisable.
It did work we got the results we were looking for while we created the new design.
Confessions of a whitehat that looked to the darkside if only for a short time. ;-)
Display:none is not only useless in most circumstances, Google clearly stated its a negative quality signal. By itself it won't do any harm (there are plenty of legit, non-SEO reasons for using display:none), but I'd think twice before using it on a site that's less than clean. You stack your cards too high they're bound to collapse.
Well stated !
To John Andrews: hiding keyword text using CSS for SEO purposes has been on a problem. Matt Cutts has talked about it on his blog and has given several specific examples of websites that Google has penalized for hiding text using CSS.
What's funny is that Blogger.com (owned by Google) advises blogger.com users to use display:none to create expandable post summaries.
@cyclelicious: if "hiding keyword text using CSS" has been a problem, then address that. This article addresses "using display:none" which by my view is a troublesome path to take, and ultimately not helpful.
Webmasters use display:none all the time. To suggest it is an seo tactic is irresponsible. Go ahead and discuss abuses of display:none, but even then, please refrain from labeling abuse of display:none as an "SEO tactic" except where you cite specific cases of known SEOs using display:none abusively.
Your note about the expandable summaries is a perfect example. It's a legitimate user interface technique, yet for some reason you feel the need to highlight it in the context of SEO. With that logic, the keyboard is an instrument of abuse by SEOs and so maybe keyboards should be addressed by the google guidelines?
People are so quick to call anything deceptive "SEO", when actually that slander of SEO is the most deceptive part of the discussion.