Hi I was just looking through a site I liked and saw that they are what I would call hiding text, is this SEO cheating?

 

 

HTML

<div class="displaynone">

<h2>‘Lodges for Sale’</h2>

</div>

 

CSS

.displaynone {

display: none;

}

To my knowledge, yes, it's black hat SEO. However i have sneaky feeling that it's hard to spot 'cheats' like this.. but once caught out, they will sink to the very bottom of the SE.

You shouldn't use Display: None; - that gets picked up by search engines... however, it is very legitimate to use text-indent: -9999px; to hide a H tag, but you should only do that for aesthetics.

 

Example would be...

 

1. Hide the text

2. Replace with an image

 

So that when the user/bot has no css enabled, it see's your H tags and they are still descriptive.

 

It is not so much about how you hide them; just what you hide within them. If you stuff loads of keywords, then you'll get found out...

Cheers guys just interesting to see what other though about this,