| Is non-malicious hidden text frowned upon? | ericLawrence | 7/14/09 12:08 PM | Hello. I'm in the process of converting PSD files to html pages for the company I work for. As expected, there is a substantial amount of text that cannot be displayed through most browsers. I'd like to remain as faithful to the PSDs as possible and |
| Re: Is non-malicious hidden text frowned upon? | John | 7/14/09 12:15 PM | Use an alt tag for what it was intended, rather than CSS hiding. |
| Re: Is non-malicious hidden text frowned upon? | Volvox777 | 7/14/09 12:16 PM | This is what alt and image title tags are for. Also, each page should have only one H1 tag - it is the main title of the page - a book can't have two titles and neither can a web page. As a general rule, Google will frown upon any text that is hidd |
| Re: Is non-malicious hidden text frowned upon? | ericLawrence | 7/14/09 12:25 PM | Thanks Volvox. I've not used multiple <h1> tags per page. I used <h1> in my example because my concern is that the alt tag will not be paid due attention by the crawler. The image text is, in fact, the page title. Thus, it deserves the priority level |
| Re: Is non-malicious hidden text frowned upon? | Volvox777 | 7/14/09 2:59 PM | Hiding H1 text will not be seen as 'non malicious' - it will be seen as very naughty. I know that a pic can tell a 1000 words and poor old Googlebot can't read pics, but what you need to do is strike a balance between visible text and img alt tags. |
| Re: Is non-malicious hidden text frowned upon? | ericLawrence | 7/14/09 4:20 PM | I'm not sure if anyone is understanding my question. I'm not interested in personal opinions regarding alt tags and hidden text. I also understand the importance of using actual text instead of images and to be perfectly honest, had I designed the si |
| Re: Is non-malicious hidden text frowned upon? | shades1 | 7/14/09 4:31 PM | Hi Eric, since the algorithms are not human, then I would say yes it could be an issue. The algorithm isn't able to take that into account. If your site would ever get flagged as hidden text (remember this still isn't done by a human), then you would |
| Re: Is non-malicious hidden text frowned upon? | ericLawrence | 7/14/09 4:33 PM | Thank you shades. Best (only) answer. |
| Re: Is non-malicious hidden text frowned upon? | Becky Sharpe | 7/14/09 4:34 PM | Google expects to see precisely the same thing that the user does. The user can't see hidden text - QED - Google doesn't like it. The motives don't come into it. Whether or not Google chooses to penalize the page is one issue - whether the page with |
| Re: Is non-malicious hidden text frowned upon? | Volvox777 | 7/14/09 5:34 PM | Eric You should keep in mind that almost everything you get in here is opinion. If you get a response from a Google employee then it is fair to say it is a factual answer. The opnions of all responses above is that you should not do this. |
| Re: Is non-malicious hidden text frowned upon? | JohnMu | 7/15/09 5:11 AM | Hi Eric If you are using image replacement techniques and replacing the text with an image that is equivalent (with the exact same text in approximately the same visibility) then that is generally fine. This provides a nice user experience and still |
| Re: Is non-malicious hidden text frowned upon? | Jsavvy | 6/13/10 11:03 PM | at smx advanced there was a question about headings that are contained within an image which should be the H1 tag of the page. Can image replacement be used? the answer by Vanessa Fox basically said using CSS such as putting it off page -9999 was |