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SEO hidden text and AJAX

(devx.lt)
81 points Bogdanas | 1 comments | 30 Jul 15 12:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.257s | source
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at-fates-hands ◴[30 Jul 15 14:17 UTC] No.9975086[source]▶
This proves nothing.

Sure, it indexes the text, but that has no bearing on SEO.

Most people using hidden text use it as a keyword stuffing tool, stuffing more relevant keywords into the page in order to get higher page rankings.

A lot of SEO techniques and how Google views them comes down to intent. It's pretty clear using hidden text and other gray and black hat methods will be picked up by Google and penalized because its clear the intent is to try and gain an advantage in the SERPS. This has been true going on ten years or more:

source: https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change#2000

Cassandra — April 2003 Google cracked down on some basic link-quality issues, such as massive linking from co-owned domains. Cassandra also came down hard on hidden text and hidden links.

replies(1): >>9975101 #
colinbartlett ◴[30 Jul 15 14:18 UTC] No.9975101[source]▶
Right, the whole article seems to prove something fairly obvious:

"So here You have it. Google can index (and indexes) hidden text and dynamically inserted text."

Then concludes the entire thing with something completely unrelated:

"If content is relavant [sic] to Your website, You won't get penalty from google."

replies(2): >>9975230 #>>9976296 #
1. nkozyra ◴[30 Jul 15 14:36 UTC] No.9975230[source]▶
The last line is related, but is based on some faulty logic. The penalty isn't going to be evident if you're doing a search like:

in:mysite.example.com "explicit text search"

All you're seeing is that your site was indexed. The author posits that since the page is visible in the index, there was no penalty. That's not true at all, of course. If there were 1,000,000 results for a more generalized search like "explicit text search," the author's pages could well be very, very low and that could very well be due to gleaned greyhat techniques.