GWHG Highlight: Hidden text and the reconsideration request
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A thread was started on July 3, 2007 by the owner of a site who believes that Google has stopped indexing his/her site because:
About three weeks ago I turn[ed] a cookies feature on which would help to prevent abuse of the site. I believe this also cause all bots to stop crawling the site.
Google does mention that the use of cookies could be problematic, specially if it’s required to properly see the site.
Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site
Had the cookies caused a problem it could have been diagnosed by using the Lynx browser.
That’s not why I am pointing out this thread.
Googler MattD steps in and points out some “old” pages of the site that contain a significant amount of hidden text (click link to view the hidden text). Noteworthy in this discussion is the fact that MattD went beyond normal protocol and provided site specific information. The danger of doing this is that everyone may expect this sort of person treatment, which isn’t feasible and is the wrong assumption, but it also is a great milestone and example that should be held up as model for others to learn from. From this example I drew the following opinions.
- It’s good to have an idea of what you may have done to get in trouble, but don’t let that idea get in the way of other possibilities. Often having multiple people look at the site will get you differing views that you the owner who is often too close to the site and wouldn’t see as a problem.
- We don’t know how MattD knew what the site was in trouble for, was it a manual review or a signal in some of their wonder tools? Either way they know. Remember Susan mentioned that a review of your site will probably include a deeper look at it’s over-all practices.
- When submitting your reconsideration request you must be forthright and include ALL discretions, even the old ones specially the old ones. More than likely a ban or penalty is not from what you did last night but from a while ago, a review of the entire site is in order along with a recount of all the changes.
- It is entirely possible that the site and or pages ranking was affected by the hidden text, after reconsideration the site may not regain its original position since that effect is now gone.
- If you are penalized its because Google has decided that you were attempting to fool the search algorithm. If when you submit a reconsideration request that is incomplete and doesn’t include all problems, that could also be considered an attempt to deceive, though Adam Lasnik has said multiple reconsideration requests are not seen as a signal to be held against you. I wouldn’t assume that filing a 2nd or 3rd request would be aggregated with the previous one, more than likely a different person is reviewing it. If I were to submit an additional request with more information I’d include the previous statements as well
- This is always a problem with a 3rd party looking at a site. We are not always given all of the information available, access to all of the sites pages on the server, or knowledge of what was done before. We only see the state the site is in now and without a context in which to put that in. Google on the other hand is the king of data storage and can contrast and compare multiple various previous incarnations.
On July 11th, 2007, Susan M. said:
