Comments on: Index me, baby!

By: Romuald

Romuald — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 00:54:57 +0000

Very interesting experiment, I often wonder â€“ why Google sees baby our errors and in the meme temples sees the others who plays Black SEO ?

By: Russ

Russ — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 08:46:21 +0000

Hi Cara,
There is a strong possibility that my experiment was totally flawed. Regardless, it was fun.

By: Cara Williams

Cara Williams — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 04:15:23 +0000

Nice experiment Russ!

I see the naughty page is indexed perfectly by google.

So what does this mean? The idea that you’ll get black listed or at least penalised by google … is just a myth?

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 23:01:41 +0000

Good conversation. I use the “display: none” for good… a way to hide/show related informational articles on a product page without cluttering up the page. Like some do for toggling answers in FAQ lists. However, after tracking numerous pages long term, I’m pretty sure that google is penalizing (and not indexing) the pages that use this. Sub-pages that are deeper than the penalized page even have decent ranking; whereas, the offending page is not indexed at all. In this case, the display:none is inline surrounding a large block of text. I sometimes use it in external style sheets and in those cases it doesn’t seem to offend. Please continue the discussion… I’d love to hear more.

By: Russ

Russ — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 18:53:39 +0000

That could say more about this site than Google.

By: Cola

Cola — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 08:21:06 +0000

Wil be interesting to see the outcome of this. Already the test has shown that Yahoo indexes faster than Google! All 4 pages were picked up by Yahoo UK & Ireland yesterday, and the tumleweed still blows at Google today

By: Sheri Bigelow

Sheri Bigelow — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 19:30:24 +0000

I think you’re right about using broad measures like rejecting “display: none” and the like. I agree it is too broad and would hurt too many valid uses (for now). That’s why I thought of OCR, but it’s just conjecture. Check this out:
http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2006/08/announcing-tesseract-ocr.html

Great conversation btw. Thanks for posting it.

By: Russ

Russ — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 04:18:54 +0000

“What about OCR? That would be one way for search engines to detect differences in image replacement and corresponding text.”

This is definitely not my area of speciality but I’d say that is not likely as it would involve a large amount of processing on Googles part. Others have suggested that Google could index CSS files, looking for “display: none” or other hiding mechanisms. The reality is that this would hurt so many developers who are using these techniques for valid reasons, so again, it does not seem to be likely.