Is this a bad thing to do...??

Okay... I've been trying to optimize my personal site for a variety of topics. Eventually, once it becomes business related, it will involve all of these topics in product, but for right now, it's pretty much a "personal site".

My question involves optimization in the respect that I've been using SEODoctor to test things out. The index page is a modified splash page though... where it consists of one <h1> and some images that link to the rest of the site. Is it a BAD thing to put the keywords on the page in text that's the same color of the background (so it's invisible to the viewer) in order to have "body content" on the page? Without doing this, SEODoctor tells me that I need more body content... and therefore gives the page a much lower rating (4 out of 5 on the meter, as opposed to a perfect 5 out of 5 when the "invisible text" is there).

If this is a bad thing, and can get me banned, I need to change it and come up with another way to take care of things. The title, description, and meta tags are perfect as they are, so changing them is not an option.

Any opinion or advice is much appreciated... :smile:

yep, hidden text is a bad thing, and can be penalized. having said that, google does a very poor job of catching it, so you could possibly get away with it for a very long time. however, you are taking a chance by doing so. the way your site has it now (with the light text at the top) seems ok to me. it was actually informative to me, the reader, as i then knew what the site was about. seeing the different topics like that made me want to explore more. without the text, i probably wouldn't have gone any farther. so from a user's perspective, NOT hiding that text is a good thing, imo.

thanks donna! i guess i just need to decide what to do for "body" text... right now it's in white around the sides of the boxes in the middle... where you wouldn't see it unless you highlighted the whole page. LOL


maybe i'll throw it in a better description underneath the bottom links, where you'd have to scroll down to see it... considering that the boxes are the jumping off point, then most people won't scroll down and see the "ugly" words... lol

i appreciate your feedback about the top part in lighter text too... i was debating it, and i'm glad to see that it's actually a good thing!

If what you want to do is hide text there's a couple other ways to do it ...

First off, you mentioned SEODoctor so I'm not sure why you're looking further than that. It basically does what you're asking and a few other things so if you're using it and haven't discovered the content injection part you're not really using it at all. Unless it's a different SEODoctor than MikeV was chatting about last week (took a peek at it ... pretty kewl)

So first I'd double check what you're using . The URL of the site I'm thinking about is www.seodoctor.com. if you can confirm that we're talking about the same tool I'd question why you want to bother hiding text in the background. Seems like an unnecessary risk to me.

BUT if you do want to hide text in the background and you aren't using the SEODoctor that I'm familiar with another trick is to use colored text that matches a portion of your site (like the blue band at the bottom of your covergirlezine page for example). Rather than coloring the table cell blue, create a gif the same color as your text and set it as your background for the cell. Google can't read your image so it will only see text over a background image (very common). Little do they know the text and the background image are the same color so the text won't show. Make active link text the same as well and you've got hidden links.

Hope this helps. It might not be white knight SEO tactics but it works.

Nope, it's not that one... it's the one at www.instantposition.com




I guess that's KINDA what I did on the ladydelaluna site, though I didn't use a background image at all, I just made the words white on the white page...





It does help! Thanks! I'm just nervous is all... lol