Back in 2001, hidden text was extremely popular. If you wanted to show up on Yahoo, and maybe on Google, all you needed was to implement tons of text on your website, repeating your keywords over and over, and then hide the text so users didn’t see all of the “ugly” things you had done.

A few years later, every major search engine is basically immune, but it doesn’t stop people from trying and hurting their websites. I’m still surprised at the amount of websites that I come across that make an attempt to exploit hidden text in one form or another.

Here are three of the most common ways that I see websites attempt to hide text. (Spoiler Alert: None of these are a good idea):

1. Text Color is the Same Color as the Background

If you have a white background, there’s really no legitimate reason to have your text’s color be white unless you’re attempting to manipulate search engines (by stuffing a lot of hidden keywords onto pages). One of the easiest ways to spot this is to a quick “ctrl + A” to select all.

Yes, having keywords within the text is a good thing, but to have text hidden so that no user can actually read your content doesn’t qualify for search engines’ goal of having user-friendly websites.

2. Text Behind Images

I’ve seen a handful of websites that create a block of text that is just a list of keywords, but then position an image over it so that no one can read the text. It’s still there and can be found by search engines, but not the user.

Again, this isn’t helpful for the user and is another attempt at trying to manipulate your website’s rankings. It’s best if you avoid this practice.

3. Large Amounts of Text Underneath the Fold

Although not technically hidden, putting a huge mass of text below the fold is yet another little maneuver to have a lot of keywords stuffed into text without having the text readily visible. (Note: The fold of a website is the lowest visible point of a website/webpage when it first loads. When you start scrolling down, you are going below the fold.)

I’ve seen this done with a heading like, “We serve the following areas…” and then a list of every city and county within the state where the company is based. Aside from no one being willing to read through a huge block of text or list of hundreds of cities, search engines will frown upon it—and will most likely show their disapproval by not showing your website for any keywords you want.

What Does All of this Mean?

Ensure that all of your text is visible and directed towards the user. Doing so will inevitably help your keyword rankings in the long run more than trying to trick search engines. Why risk being filtered from search engine result pages?