Hidden links for SEO visibility

Followers

September 10, 200917 yr

I know this isn't strictly the right board for this question, but I figured this area gets way more traffic than the SEO area, and this is a sort of "How do I..?" question anyway.

I've just finished a website with 20 HTML pages, and I've included an XML sitemap as standard. But I decided to add another SEO trick into the pages: one of the first things in the <body> section was a hidden div with links of the most important pages.

My logic is that crawlers see this and immediately mark these other pages for indexing. I've put the XML sitemap first, followed by each product page. I figured this was a good technique to make sure important pages are indexed. But then again, I remember reading that Google and other search engines HATE hidden keyword/content and I can't help feel like this is slightly black-hat what I'm doing, because it's a div with display:none...

What are your thoughts? Good technique, or black-hat SEO?

Darren

September 10, 200917 yr

Basically, don't do it. Here are two links you should read:-

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum83/6691.htm

http://searchengineland.com/is-hiding-content-with-display-none-legitimate-seo-13643

September 10, 200917 yr

ouch ouch ouch. Good luck getting that site ranking up.

September 10, 200917 yr

Come away from the dark side... Blackhat SEO that is.

September 10, 200917 yr

Author

Yikes, OK, point taken, thanks fellas. Promptly removed from the site.

The second article there is more informative and makes a good point - how do search engines know the difference between black hat keyword/link hiding and white-hat navigation-enhancing code, like Amazon's hidden menu?

Come to think of it, could other legitimite uses of display:none be penalised by the search engines?