4. Invisible text and the use of colour.
Now that we know about the cunning and simple redirect, let’s take a
fleeting look at some of the other most popular methods of hiding content from
the user – and getting your site black-listed from popular search engines!
Try hovering your mouse over some of the images on this web site, and you will
probably see some text popup next to your mouse pointer that describes the image
or link.
- ALT Tags
These portions of text are created using what are known as <ALT> tags. These
tags were originally intended to be used to help visually impaired users find
links and information quickly and with minimum fuss.
The spammers quickly caught on however, and started using them as another way
of hiding keywords from the user. Many web sites use very tiny images (1 pixel
in diameter) to help provide structure to complex designs.
Whilst this is a perfectly acceptable practice, stuffing ALT tags associated
with such images full of keywords is not. One could even go as far as to say that
it is ethically unacceptable.
- Comment tags
Another method of achieving the same result is to use comment tags. These are
used by programmers as a reminder to themselves to sort out various pieces of
code, or simply to describe functions in plain English for later reference.
Denoted by the following tag <! -- spam keywords here -->, some developers
use them in an attempt to trick the search engines. This tactic in general will
be of little use, and many search engines simply ignore them.
- Use of colour
Most text displayed on the web uses a black font on either a white or light coloured
background. Occasionally a weird and whacky web site may spring up where bright
coloured text is juxtaposed with a jazzy background, but not often.
Readers prefer the traditional black on white format, simply because it is
easier on the eye, and therefore easier to read.
The background of web page itself however does not need to be white. Tables
and layers can be used to present white text areas super-imposed above brightly
coloured backgrounds. This is good. It makes the web a more vibrant and fun place
to be, but can also be abused.
All too often the spam troopers will use the same coloured text and background
colour to stuff keywords into a space that the user cannot see. The search engine,
of course can. Again, this practice is to be avoided as many search engines now
include filters in the algorithms to detect the practice.
