PhilC’s Ramblings

Yesterday, Google’s Matt Cutts posted an example of a Dutch newspaper site that was spamming the search engines by using hidden text. The example was to show how Google dealt with it. What they did was temporarily remove the site from the index, and contacted the owners to tell them why. The owners subsequently cleaned up the site, and it was put back into the index.

Google is very good, and unique, in that they do inform some website owners that they are transgressing their guidelines, so that the sites can be cleaned up and re-included in the index. But Matt’s example is sure to leave many webmasters very frustrated.

In the item, Matt wrote, “Hidden text is also not fair to other sites that try to compete for similar queries without hiding words from users.” and he is right. Higher rankings are common with sites that go against Google’s guidelines by including spammy hidden text, than sites that are afraid to use such techniques for fear of being banned, and the clean sites lose out to the dirty sites. It is unfair because the owners of clean sites feel that they need to risk being banned by Google, or accept that they can’t compete at all.

So why would the Dutch newspaper example be frustrating to many webmasters? Because it is only an example. It isn’t the norm for Google to remove sites with hidden text from the index. In forums, people often post that they’ve reported a site for hidden text many times, and that nothing is ever done about it. Once in a while something gets done, but mostly that isn’t the case. That’s what makes it frustrating. It’s alright to trot out a public example now and again, but that doesn’t do anything about the problem that clean webmasters have, and that Matt acknowledges.

Google have said that they prefer to deal with things programmatically, rather than by hand, and that’s fine, but the hidden text method, for the purpose of higher rankings, is much older than Google, and Google still can’t deal with it programmatically. No search engine can deal with it, because there are many perfectly good reasons for hidden text, and they can’t yet programmatically differentiate between those and spam.

The answer is for Google to recognise the fact that a programmatic solution for spammy hidden text is not around the corner, and to deal with all reported sites by hand, just as they did with the Dutch newspaper site. It would make spammy hidden text much more dangerous, because of the risk of being reported by a competitor, which would cause the use of the method to largely fade away, and make a much more level playing field for clean sites.

Spammy hidden text is kept alive and well by Google’s reluctance to deal with most of it by hand. The other engines are also guilty, but webmasters are more concerned about Google. If Google dealt with hidden text reports by hand, then webmasters would be much more afraid of using the method. It would tend to disappear, and clean sites would not be at an unfair disadvantage so often.