Use div tags too hide words as content for seo optimization?

[deady]

Hello, i recently read that a good tip for seo optimization is too have atleast 500 words in your webpages... can this be hidden and still read by the div tag? So if i used div = height 1 width = 1 and fill it with words relating to my sites content, it would still be read by search engines such as google and the like?? Thanks in advance!

[967]

No just do this

<!--
Put content here
-->

This will keep things invisible but I would not take this route. It is sort of frowned upon because if you can't come up with 500 words to say, should you put the page there at all. This distorts the ranking in search engines so that your site, which has little to offer for the human being, comes up before a really good site that is not built just to rank high in search engines. And that is really not fair to people who have worked hard to create quality content rich sites. And it may end up hurting you in the long run because, as I said, this is frowned upon in the seo community. There are far better ways to optimize your site. And remember, you don't just want them to visit your site, you want them to stay for a while and come back again soon. And they won't if your words are hidden.

Instead, if you are wanting to add content to your page, try adding an RSS feed to your page http://www.feedroll.com will help you with this. Find a feed that is suited to the topic of your site. This is also good because the information is updated frequently.

I am in this crazy seocontest and I had to build lots of content in a few weeks. My site is at http://shopautodotcaseo.tripod.com and here you can see lots of ideas for how to optimize your site without having to hide words.

If you do want to hide words, add a hidden joke. Then if someone want to check out your scripting there is a hidden funny treat for them. And there is nothing wrong with a little bit more funny.

[MerryG]

General rule of thumb for SEO - don't 'hide' anything. The major search engines are looking for applicable, appropriate content for the website's end user. If you hide key phrases it might work for a while but if the SE gets wind of it (especially Google) it will likely ban your site. Best thing to do is write good, user-friendly, informative text, litter it with 'hot' keywords to other areas of the site and develop a symbiotic link exchange. The more links coming to your site from other sites, the better, whether they're reciprocal or not.

[fixedinseattle]

i think google has learned about this 'trick' long ago and probably can figure it out...

you'd be soooo much better off writing 500 words of valuable content (in a div if you prefer), this will help your seo rankings much than garbage text.

[rohanandrajan]

Basically <noscript> your hidden content </noscript> is used for hidding text from visitors but search engine spiders can easily read them, you can also check it by having preview from any text based browser like lynx

Mostly blackhat seo experts use this trick to hide their <h1> content that make their pages clean and no spam visible to users whereas search engine spider can analyse the content between <noscript> and </noscript> tags

Its a blackhat and if it is analysed and reported to search engines and then there are highly chances to have the websites banned