Chiropractic Homepage

Hidden text (in relation to this article) is a search engine spamming technique that used to be popular a few years ago. In recent years, Google, and other major search engines, have figured out ways to determine whether text is hidden on web pages. As a result websites employing techniques such as hidden text are typically banned.

Hidden text is most commonly achieved by setting the font color to be the same as the background color, rendering the text invisible unless the user highlights it.

Whether it was done by you or your webmaster, using techniques such as hiding keyword text can get your website banned in major search engines like Google and others. It’s a pretty foolish technique and it’s very easy to spot, even with the human eye.

I was visiting a chiropractic website, for an office that was located somewhere in Virginia, and I was noticing that there was a blue border with about an inch of blue space across the bottom pages of the website. Looked like nothing at first but something triggered me to take a closer look. I right-clicked the page to take a look at the source code for the web site I was visiting.

Take a look at the image…

Just a blue screen at the bottom of a chiropractic webpage. Appears innocent enough hey? Let’s drag our mouse over the blue area and see if anything appears.

Presto, look at all the hidden text appearing on this page.

According to the hidden text, looks like this website wanted to get ranked for terms such as Chiropractor, Massage, Southside Chiropractors, Hanover Chiropractors, Richmond Virginia Chiropractor, Richmond chiropractic, Chiropractic massage, Massage therapy, Chiro clinic, and a whole list of other rather redundant stuff.

Problem is the hidden text sets one up for a website ban and they may not even know why (although it’s likely they do). A simple way to correct this entire mess is to actually create some good content using some of the terms found inside the hidden text.

For example… Our Southside Chiropractors and massage staff at West Virginia Chiropractic Wellness offer relaxing body treatments, relieve stress, provide spa services, and specialize in addressing the causes of back pain, neck pain, pregnancy pain, and others. Even if you are searching for a Glen Allen chiropractor or a Hanover chiropractor, we feel our office in Henrico is worth the extra few miles of travel.

Not all the text was used but that’s only one paragraph of content. Don’t need much on a single page anyway. My advice: get creative, don’t hide text on pages, form some smart paragraphs that use location information properly, and be sure to link to this website.