Hiding Keywords or Using Invisible Keywords on Your Pages ( Not recommended )

Have you ever seen a Web site that has hundreds of keywords repeated at the bottom of the page? Sometimes these words are the same color as the background so you only notice them if you highlight a section of the page and they show up as reversed white on black text. This is an attempt by that Web site owner to rank well in the different search engines for the keywords listed there.

Search engines used to be fooled by this technique. Some Web site promotion "experts" still recommend using this technique while others believe that it will do little good.

The latest work around suggests that instead of using a font color that is identical to the background, pick one that is just very similar and hard to see as follows:

<BG COLOR= 808080> <FONT COLOR=" 778899">

The background color above is plain "gray." The text color selected is "lightslategray." The color is numerically different, yet very similar and difficult or impossible to see (you can choose colors that are even more difficult to detect if you wish). Notice also that the hex code that identifies the "lightslategray" color seems numerically very close to the background color.

In time, I expect search engines will recognize colors that are this close numerically. When they do, they will probably recognize it as an attempt to hide text and penalize sites accordingly.

Exercise caution when using this technique. Many search engines dislike it since it can be abused. Also, NEVER, NEVER enter keywords on your page that have nothing to do with your site's content, or are not used elsewhere on the page already. To do so diminishes the value of the search engine service since doing a search could display pages that don't apply to that search! If you do this, then you deserve to get banned from the search engine.