Is this considered Black Hat?
-
So here is the website I’m looking at, it ranks #1 in keywords like used cars for sale billings mt, etc. I was trying to figure out how, because there is no content on the page! I am working on one of our sites to get it to rank better when I found this in my research.
So I did a “view page source” to see how many times they’re using keywords and what they’re title and description tags are.
WAIT WHAT…. WHERE IS THIS CONTENT?!
Then I found it…
It doesn’t even read like real content. This has to be considered poor form. I'm not sure why it makes me so angry. What do you guys think?
-
The fact they are hiding content IMO this is black hat. But, don't get too caught up in it being black hat. I know your site and in most searches you are ahead of them. They have 4 backlinks all no followed. I think there are things you could do on other pages on your site to push them down and end up with more than one page on the SERP.
Go get em!
-
It definitely seems shady. I wasn't sure if this was considered "hiding" or "cloaking" because you can easily find the text when you view the source (and I assume that looks more like what the search engines are viewing ) but you have to click several times and you have to know where to look to find it.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66353?hl=en
This is the article I found to correspond with it.
Thanks for your feedback!
-
Generally I wouldn't consider that "black hat", although it is hiding the content on the page--which is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. They've mentioned before that if you have content that is "hidden" like this to most users, the expanded content should be displayed in the expanded mode, not in the way it's being done here.
This generally doesn't quality as being "black hat", though.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Would you consider this thin content?
Just wondering what the community thinks about the following URLS and whether they are essentially thin content that should be handled through a canonical, noindex or a parameter filtering system: https://www.adversetdisplay.co.uk/products/3x1-popup-exhibition-stand https://www.adversetdisplay.co.uk/products/3x2-popup-exhibition-stand https://www.adversetdisplay.co.uk/products/3x3-popup-exhibition-stand https://www.adversetdisplay.co.uk/products/3x4-popup-exhibition-stand https://www.adversetdisplay.co.uk/products/3x5-popup-exhibition-stand
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColinDocherty0 -
Do search engine consider this duplicate or thin content?
I operate an eCommerce site selling various equipment. We get product descriptions and various info from the manufacturer's websites offered to the dealers. Part of that info is in the form of User Guides and Operational Manuals downloaded in pdf format written by the manufacturer, then uploaded to our site. Also we embed and link to videos that are hosted on the manufacturer's respective YouTube or Vimeo channels. This is useful content for our customers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelFactor
My questions are: Does this type of content help our site by offering useful info, or does it hurt our SEO due to it being thin and or duplicate content? Or does the original content publishers get all the benefit? Is there any benefit to us publishing this stuff? What exactly is considered "thin content"?0 -
AngularJS - What To Consider?
Hi all, I have a website which is going to be rebuild in AngularJS. It's a massive website that recieves a lot of traffic. As I am new to AngularJS and with less programming knowledge, I am not 100% confident about how to go about it. I am requesting MOZers to please point me in the right direction to get the SEO right. What are the things to take care of? How it will impact the search engine rankings etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
Would this be considered cloaking and would it be a bad move?
I posted this topic last night, http://moz.com/community/q/seo-dealing-with-a-cdn-on-a-site about issues I am having with a client's images falling out of index because they have a CDN now. So I have come up with a work around, but it might be considered cloaking and I am not sure. A month ago we changed over to using a CDN and the images started falling out of the index after that. Currently when you land on a page the images are served from cdn.site.com What I am thinking about doing is detecting Google Bot and when Google Bot crawls the site serve images from site.com. The images will be the exact same images as served from the CDN so it is not a content switcharoo thing. It is just to try to get the images back in the index. So would this be considered cloaking in your opinion?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LesleyPaone0 -
Showing specific info just for our own IP. May google consider this cloaking?
I want to show some additional info on our website that will only be visible to the IP address of our office. Do I need to be concerned that google may consider this cloaking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
What is Considered Over-Optimization?
Apart from keyword stuffing, what is considered by Google as over-optimization? For instance, if I link from a subdomain to a page on my main domain with a keyword-rich anchor text, does it qualify as over-optimization?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Are sub domains considered completely different than the root domain?
We have a project that is going to generate duplicate content. If we move the new content to a sub-domain (E.g. product.domain.com) will it still be considered duplicate content to the root domain? Or is it like having two completely different domains? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tripled5110 -
I tried the directorie list of seomoz, but almost all of them charged for the inclusion. This is a black hat situation?
I need backlinks for my site, and several places inform that directories are a good place. But they charge for the inclusion. Should I pay? This is a blackhat situation where I'm buying for links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Naghirniac0