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How to Use Invisible Text Without Being Penalized by the Search Engines
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by Ralph Tegtmeier
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Contrary to what is generally circulated as accepted knowledge among search engine gurus, you can actually put a fair amount of invisible text on your web page without being penalized for it by search engines.

I know that this may raise the huff with some experts, but hold on: what I *DO NOT* mean is simply putting body text in same color as background. (You know, the stuff you can easily see after all on a page if you press Ctrl-A or mark everything with your left mouse button.) What I'm referring to instead is Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a standard which is currently not supported by *any* SE to my knowledge.

Example: ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ If you place your text between tags like

right at the top of your page above your tables, you should do quite nicely.

By way of an alternative CSS approach, you might employ an external style sheet (preferably in another directory) instead. There, you simply define a special class for a tag like

where font and background color are identical - no way for current SEs to distinguish color codes and penalize mismatch until they sit down to their homework and start learning CSS. (Which again is pretty unlikely to happen as long as they don't give a fig about a site's design, layout and optics in the first place.)

Nor is this pure theory either - we have positioned literally hundreds of pages for our clients that way with great success.

Perhaps you'd like to give it a try with a test page or two and fine tune your approach from there.

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This text may freely be republished or distributed in unmodified form provided the following resource box is included intact either at the beginning or the end of the article and a complimentary copy or notice (link) is sent to the author at the address specified below:

Ralph Tegtmeier is the co-founder and principal of fantomaster.com GmbH (Belgium), http://fantomaster.com, a company specializing in webmasters software development, industrial-strength cloaking and search engine positioning services.

He has been a web marketer since 1994 and is editor-in-chief of fantomNews, a free newsletter focusing on search engine optimization, available at: http://fantomaster.com/fantomnews-sub.html You can contact him at mailto:fneditor@fantomaster.com
(c) copyright 2002 by fantomaster.com
All rights reserved.
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