Say your code is like this:
#topbanner
{
margin: 0;
padding: 3px;
background: #fff;
}
h1
{
background: url(./logo.png) no-repeat;
height: 88px;
margin: 0;
text-indent: -2000px;
}
Your keywords which are never seen
On the page the logo will appear and the text between the heading tags ('s) is never seen (unless stylesheet doesn't display).
Is this worth it? Would it been counted as hidden keywords/spam keywords or would the SE bot think it normal (legit) code?
<?bhb if(broken){ echo("It wasn't me 
"); } ?>
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Renegade posted this at 11:12—7th March 2006.
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I think the bots just read the HTML and not the HTML.
I usually do something similar to that too. I label things like, navigation and what not so that people without CSS can actually view the site properly too.
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timjpriebe posted this at 14:32—7th March 2006.
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Huh? Did you mean they read the HTML and not the CSS?
There's been several sites where I put something like that in the code. Generally it's site titles, where the title will actually be represented by an image. It seems to have worked fine so far. I still get decent search engine rankings.
Tim
http://www.tandswebdesign.com
Renegade posted this at 17:39—7th March 2006.
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Haha yeah, sorry, that's exactly what I meant
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Busy posted this at 20:59—7th March 2006.
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I'm not rubbing off on you am I Renegade
Renegade posted this at 05:22—8th March 2006.
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Yeah, I think you are...
I'm with teammatt3 here on this one. Putting in things like headers for different sections in HTML and hiding it with CSS for older browsers seems to makes sense to me.
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teammatt3 posted this at 22:28—7th March 2006.
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I have been using that for about a year, I have never been penalized for it and I will keep doing it until SEs start reading CSS. When they do finally start reading CSS you could make an image that has a bg color of FFFFFF and then put white text over it. Search engines won't read images for a very long time.
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locatepeople posted this at 17:44—10th March 2006.
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I've not used it personally but I've never heard anyone complain about a problem with it.
typically, though, the Ses want every keyword to be visible.
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steve40 posted this at 23:42—30th May 2006.
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I am thinking you might get by with it for awhile, but it is definitely hidden key-words, by anybodies definition.
Renegade posted this at 23:50—30th May 2006.
He has: 2,943 posts
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I disagree. How I usually use them is to hide things from browsers which display CSS properly.
For example, I may use a heading of "Navigation" for my... navigation (gasp). Hiding that from the more modern browsers would make sense because - depending on design - the navigation area is obvious. On the other hand, for browsers which don't render CSS properly or at all, it may not be obvious where the navigation is. Not to mention those who surf with CSS turned off.
Another thing I hide at times are tags. This way, if CSS is turned off or not showing at all, the sections are still clearly sectioned.
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The Webmistress posted this at 12:23—31st May 2006.
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Google can now apparently read css and determine layouts, so hiding anything will be BAD for SEO!
Julia - if life was meant to be easy Michael Angelo would have painted the floor....
liway posted this at 12:24—31st May 2006.
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google says that loading a page with keywords is not allowed. so don't. end of.
steve40 posted this at 17:02—31st May 2006.
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Here is the way WDG says to handle a img header, Just like I said.
Megan posted this at 17:22—31st May 2006.
She has: 10,041 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
I think the main reason this technique was devised was for accessibility. So if you put it in the text the screen reader can read it. Better than an alt tag for larger blocks of text that needs individual formatting (such as a list), and in some opinions structurally superior to just putting in an image as a headline.
This is a very controversial technqiue, commonly known as "Fahrner Image Replacement". If you do a google search on that you'll come up with a lot of debates. It seems that it's been generally debunked as an accessilibity method but picked up as a possible SEO tactic.
I think that if you're spamming keywords (like people used to do by colouring the text the same as the page background), then that's obviously not a good thing. But, if you've got a header that you want to do as an image for stylistic purposes then I don't really see a problem with it (unless the SE's think there is!). You're showing the SE proper structural markup that it can read and understand. This is a heading. This is what it says. I happen to prefer my special font so I'm going to show visual brwosers an image instead. You're not throwing in words just to target the SE's, and are providing something that both visual and non-visual browsers can read and understand as well.
I can't seem to find much about the SEO implications of doing this.
ETA: And the image as used here is not structural, it is presentational and should therefore be kept in the CSS. Looking at Busy's code, I think the display: none or visibility: hidden properties would make more sense than just moving the text off the edge of the screen. Although I haven't read all the articles on the topic so there might be some rationale behind doing it like that.
ETA2: I now understand ther eason why the text-indent is done. There are several ways to do this, none of which are really great from a semantic point of view. Kind of messy.
Also, looking at steve's code, I'm not sure that this is an appropriate technique for replacing a logo. What is a logo anyway? I wouldn't say that it's a heading. That's being really picky though
Megan
My web design blog
steve40 posted this at 18:35—31st May 2006.
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Joined: May 2005
That post was actually supposed to be under another topic. Discussing image headers, and hiding the header name/keywords from the browser.
CSS was mentioned to do this, I said use the "alt" tag. I did a little research, and WDG concurred. Do not hide the page name header words with CSS, but use the "alt" tag to display it to the bots. Not the browsers.
teammatt3 posted this at 22:13—31st May 2006.
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Where did you read that?
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steve40 posted this at 22:59—31st May 2006.
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New Googlebot read here. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=3124
The Webmistress posted this at 09:32—1st June 2006.
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Here where I read it http://www.adsensebits.com/node/24
Julia - if life was meant to be easy Michael Angelo would have painted the floor....
teammatt3 posted this at 00:25—5th June 2006.
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Ha, I think I have a way to block them from reading it. Can't you put your css in a folder and then block access to that folder using the robots.txt file? All the important search engine spiders (MSN, Yahoo, Google) obey the robots.txt file.
On the site that I "cheat" on, the CSS file is located in a sub directory of the folder /templates. So the robots.txt file would be
# Disallow directory /templates
User-agent: *
Disallow: /templates/
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demonhale posted this at 04:52—5th June 2006.
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