Hidden text is one of the oldest tricks in the SEO handbook. If you’re hoping hidden text will somehow boost your SEO efforts, you’ll quickly discover this outdated tactic is ineffective. Back in the day, when search engines were much less sophisticated, you could hide text on webpages in an attempt to gain ranking for certain keywords not visible on the page. You could also hide links on other websites linking back to the page you wanted to gain ranking. Also known as “content cloaking,” this tactic used to be work because, even though the text is hidden to users, search engines could still crawl it. But that’s no longer the case – search engines are much more sophisticated and better at detecting spammy tactics. Why Hide Text? The reasons for using hidden text, and how it is implemented, can vary. Here are a few reasons why some SEO professionals use this tactic. Including Keywords They Can’t Show to the Public For instance, competitor names. In the attempt to rank for competitor brand terms, these keywords can’t be added due to legal compliance, corporate marketing policies, or stealthy SEO approaches. There are also SEOs who use incorrectly spelled keywords and cloak them because it won’t look appropriate – and to put it bluntly, just appears wrong – if you use them on a post. Keyword Spamming the Page Some SEO professionals believe that increasing the keyword count on a page can help rank that keyword. This may have been an effective strategy in the ancient SEO ages (late ’90s to early 2000s) but not today. Hiding Links Links are still strong ranking factors. Many sites used to get links from other sites that were hidden. These links were hidden because often times they were unrelated to the content on the site where they were posted. Sometimes, the links are added on the sites that are owned by the same company, or owned by a partner that has predefined this relationship. Other times, sites are hacked to be able to add the links; this is not only bad for SEO, but is also illegal. Google doesn’t like these methods of optimization because they aren’t focused on improving ranking based on quality content; instead SEOs are merely trying to get around the search engine’s algorithm. Over the years, Google has improved its capability of determining if and where hidden content exists. If, for some reason, your hidden content gets past Google’s sophisticated crawler without detection, the quality of the hidden content or hidden links are often not good enough that they may still be ranked very low. Additionally, Google has manual reviewers whose sole task is to manually check websites for these kind of things and penalize the sites accordingly. Valid Reasons to Use Hidden Text Google uses various methods to determine whether hidden content exists on a site, but they also allow other forms of hidden content. Here are a few valid reasons to hide content: Part of Navigational Elements Too many links in the screen can be overwhelming so drop down menus, multiple hierarchy menus, accordion navigation, tabbed menus, slider menus, etc. are used to keep the page from appearing cluttered. Content is hidden from the user in the initial page load. Techniques like using a display:none property in CSS, controlled by JavaScript, can make the initial load hidden to users; hovering over or clicking on various page elements allow the hidden content to appear. The main rule here is that it should be visually obvious to users how the hidden content should appear. An arrow, a button, a link that can be obviously found by users to display the hidden content is valid to use without any negative SEO implications. The intent to hide the content is related to the user experience and avoiding clutter on the page. insurance, auto insurance, life insurance, insurance quotes, insurance companies, cheap insurance, insurance agents, auto insurance companies, liability insurance, business insurance, insurance companies near me, workers compensation insurance, commercial insurance, insurance broke, professional liability insurance, comprehensive insurance, small business insurancem, car insurance quotes online, house insurance, rv insurance, cheap insurance companies, insurance agents near me, general liability insuranceour leisure.