Search engine spamming

[Steve Morris]

Quick question!
I'm building a site and using the css class display:none to hide a H1 tag at the top of a page, would this be constituted as spamming by google / MSN / Yahoo

[Niche]

Don't know but my advise is if you are not sure, don't do it
It's tempting to fly close to the line but I assure you that you can make money with your websites while staying well within the TOS of the search engines

Would be interesting to see what others think

[Steve Morris]

With regard to sailing close to the line it seems that a standard practice is placing a H1 keyword rich tag behind the header image so the viewer does not see it, but the spiders do. is there a difference to hiding text one way or another using CSS

[jcorkern]

Let me let you in on a little secret. That is called hidden text and is a direct violation of the TOS. Now, you may feel like you are getting away with it for a while, you will get close to the first page results, maybe even into first page results, then you will get punished and may drop completely out of the top 10, or even the top 1000, then, shortly after you will be de-indexed.

They do not generally punish until you are actually competing for top positions. Every test site I have done was hit right at top 10 of shortly after getting there. There is no need for punishing until you get close to your objective. Kinda cruel, but just the facts.

Hiding text, code is never a good idea, not if you are serious about a good, solid business.

[mccain]

Hi,

Why to violate the rules of the search engines in disguise!
You may have good position in the serps initially, but once you compete for the top positions, there are chances of getting de-indexed also. So why take chances! Stay with in the TOs of Search engines.

McCain.