Hidden text question

My company is about to open a new store, and we want to be able to search our products by UPC code, however we don't really want the code to be visible on the page.

The site's owner suggested making the code the same color as the background. I know this is a big no-no with keywords, but is it okay with numbers?

Do bots check HTML to see if text color matches background color, or is that something that a human editor would do?

Thanks!

Hi Dusty, I think that in most cases it is a bot that checks therefore I don't think that it will differentiate between words or numbers. The directories like dmoz is checked by an actual person.
Anybody else know 100%

Surely if someone is going to be searching for UPC code it wont be damaging to have it visible? Altrhough I confess I have no idea what a UPC code is :-)

Consider using coment tags and if applicable use the code on image alt attributes. Or risk hiding the text, but dont make the background colour idetical to the text colour. keep the hex color codes different. But I neversaid that :-)
Seriously your best bet is to make them visible in a footer or somewhere that isnt going to be obvious.

if you think you will have people search by UPC code, i would put it in the title bar for that product. I have some e-commerce sites that do that and it works out nicely. But you should also put the UPC code in the visible body text. You must show it, dont play games with Google or search engines, not worth the risk.

Thanks for confirming my thoughts.

To clarify... the UPC code is the number associated with a product's bar code. Also, it will be for employee search use, not customers.

Regardless, I'll just stick it somewhere inconspicious rather than hidden.

Thanks!