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  • GWHG Highlight: Hidden text and the reconsideration request

10th July 2007

GWHG Highlight: Hidden text and the reconsideration request

posted in SEO, highlights, reconsideration request |

Google GroupsA 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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
  6. 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.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 2:33 am and is filed under SEO, highlights, reconsideration request. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. All comments are subject to my NoFollow policy. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There are currently 2 responses to “GWHG Highlight: Hidden text and the reconsideration request”

Why not let me know what you think by adding your own comment! All the cool kids are doing it.

  1. 1 MyAvatars 0.2 On July 11th, 2007, Susan M. said:

    It’s true that we don’t do a lot of one-off site-specific diagnoses, since they’re not always interesting/valuable to the community at large. However, when we do, we try to use tools that any of you would have access to, to try to “demystify” the process (so that people don’t think that the only way to get answers is by speaking to a Googler directly). That’s not to say that we don’t also have a bunch of awesome secret tools, but we like to use the “teach a man to fish” school of thought when possible. :)

    In this case, if you look up www .feedroller.com in Yahoo! Site Explorer, you’ll notice that the first 4 URLs lead to the same style of (keyword-free) site design that you currently see on FeedRoller’s homepage; but the next 3 URLs (the ones without the /Store/ directory) lead to what looks like a totally separate minisite (it has a different look’n'feel from the blue-themed homepage, and the two don’t seem to link between each other). Clicking around this gray-themed site, you’ll see lots of pages with keywords at the bottom. The page that Matt referenced (www .feedroller.com/nstalnstructns.html) is the #6 URL in Site Explorer right now.

    Also worth noting is that, even when Googlers make suggestions, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s been a penalty for the issue(s) that we call out. A lot of the can-you-tell-me-what’s-wrong-with-my-site requests we get are for sites that don’t have any penalties, but (as you’ve noted in the past) no penalties doesn’t always equal no violations, so we can still point out things that a webmaster could improve about their site whether or not it’s actually causing a penalty.

  2. 2 MyAvatars 0.2 On July 12th, 2007, JLH said:
    Thanks for dropping in Susan. I appreciate your contribution, I don’t have the millions of readers that some blogs do, but the regular readers are great and very knowledgeable.

    It makes sense that you’d only use the regular forensic tools, since using the super-secret bat-cave tools publicly could show too much information.

    I’d imagine the MAJORITY of the what’s-wrong-with-my-site concerns are not due to penalties, but rather just a simple downgrade in ranking, which happens. Content get’s stale, link accruing slows down, other sites outperform them, search volume switches direction…all reasons why “I used to rank better” is not always an indication that the site is now under penalty.

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