There are a number of deceitful ways to attempt to improve your page ranking in search engines.
To anyone trying this, don’t. You are taking a huge risk. Hiding text and links in your web design content may cause your website to be perceived as untrustworthy and subsequently your site may be removed from the search engines such as Google.
The sort of tricks that people may try include:
- Hiding text behind images
- Placing text outside of the normal visible page
- White text on a white background
- Hiding text withing the site code
- Using unreadable font sizes such as 0
- Creating hyperlinks that are very small and unreadable
- Matching text and background colour
- Clocking where the website may serve up different pages depending on who is visiting such as a normal visitor or a web spider. Web pages are regularly scanned by web spiders, (may be also called robots, bots and crawlers) looking for web page changes to update their databases.
Google are very clear about deceptive practices and if detected, your website may be deemed to be spam and removed from the Google index.
If your website is a business website, why would you want to practice deceptive practices such as above. The risk is not worth it.
For good page ranking, it comes down to several things, good site structure and most important of all, good and relevant content. Content is king and is the best thing you can do to improve your website ranking. Always build your website for your visitors and customers not the search engines.
Google Webmaster Guidelines are a good source of information for site design.
– Peter
