http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/82/Tutorial-Gaining-Control-of-Search-Engine-Spiders/ User submitted comments to Practical Ecommerce's article entitled Tutorial: Gaining Control of Search Engine Spiders en-us Copyright 2007 Confluence Publishing Tue, 17 Apr 2007 10:03:09 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/rss/ Practical Ecommerce v2.0.1 Ecommerce kmurdock@practicalecommerce.com bgetting@practicalecommerce.com 60 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/82/Tutorial-Gaining-Control-of-Search-Engine-Spiders/#comment1299 Trying to make decent sentences out of keywords isn't easy. It seems in order to get enough keywords on a page you almost have to add hidden text. Can you provide a good example of a site that has the right amount of keyword popular text? Even though the long-term effect may not be good, for the short-term, adding the hidden text has improved the ranking. Does a resource site exist that provides up to date rules of the search engines? Tue, 17 Apr 2007 10:03:09 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/82/Tutorial-Gaining-Control-of-Search-Engine-Spiders/#comment1299 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/82/Tutorial-Gaining-Control-of-Search-Engine-Spiders/#comment1010 Never, EVER try to sneak hidden text or links on your web page to increase its popularity with search engines! Though robots cannot differentiate between what is hidden and what is displayed, teams of HUMAN BEINGS (especially at Google) work day and night to improve the quality of their engine and hunt for such non-standard practices. You'll end up getting blacklisted from search engines for a month or more. Wed, 28 Mar 2007 06:52:25 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/82/Tutorial-Gaining-Control-of-Search-Engine-Spiders/#comment1010 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/82/Tutorial-Gaining-Control-of-Search-Engine-Spiders/#comment996 Both will work. It's up to you how you want to do it. Tue, 27 Mar 2007 09:43:49 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/82/Tutorial-Gaining-Control-of-Search-Engine-Spiders/#comment996 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/82/Tutorial-Gaining-Control-of-Search-Engine-Spiders/#comment994 Just to clarify: "Why do you use when making an anchors?" should have been... Why do you use <a name="content"></a> when making a anchor? Regards, Egil. Tue, 27 Mar 2007 02:26:44 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/82/Tutorial-Gaining-Control-of-Search-Engine-Spiders/#comment994 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/82/Tutorial-Gaining-Control-of-Search-Engine-Spiders/#comment985 A few comments. 1. This is something I have always considered good practice in regards to accessibility. Screen readers, just like web crawlers, just read the text on the page, not the styling. That is also why I don’t think search engines will consider this a cheat, since they recommend you design your website with accessibility in mind. 2. Why do you use when making an anchors? Why not use <div id="content">…</div> and then link the same way? It’s my understanding that is correct way to make anchors. Over at Htmldog.com, Patrick Griffiths has a great rundown on how to do this correctly. Let me just quote him: "The most obvious way would be to use display: none, but as some screen readers will pick up on this and not read the link, as intended, the 'Skip navigation' link must be displayed. It still doesn't have to be visible though - there's no point in showing it to visually able users. So instead of having a style containing display: none, you can set... Mon, 26 Mar 2007 14:07:48 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/82/Tutorial-Gaining-Control-of-Search-Engine-Spiders/#comment985 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/82/Tutorial-Gaining-Control-of-Search-Engine-Spiders/#comment367 Excellent and timely post. I was just researching how to do this yesterday. Found some javascript examples but was looking for a css version. It would be great if you could post two simple example pages (before and after) using this trick. Then, one could visually see how this works. Sun, 18 Feb 2007 08:59:45 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/82/Tutorial-Gaining-Control-of-Search-Engine-Spiders/#comment367 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/82/Tutorial-Gaining-Control-of-Search-Engine-Spiders/#comment321 I've read arguments against hidden text using CSS; this seems comparable, especially considering you can place keywords in the anchor text. Fri, 16 Feb 2007 18:32:37 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/82/Tutorial-Gaining-Control-of-Search-Engine-Spiders/#comment321