Google is Serious

Webmasters: Have you ever read Google's Webmaster Guidelines? Have you ever thought that, "Hey, they're just guidelines and that bit about being removed from their index is just to scare me?" Think no more: one of my own sites got removed for using so-called hidden text.

The front page of my company site was created way too long ago, and violates all kinds of rules I preach about every day. The primary one is that there was no content on the page, just a picture and image links to inside pages-- horrible for any kind of search engine optimization. So, because we did have a little bit of content inside the site, we stuck a blurb of sorts on the front page in tiny black-on-black text. And it worked; search engines, including Google, found it and us. That was literally years ago.

Today it came back to bite me. I got a form letter from Google informing me that the site was being removed, and it quoted the actual hidden text. At first I thought it was a hoax, or possibly a scam. But the mail headers proved the mail originated at Google. I had no choice but to take it seriously.

Fortunately, it was no big deal, as the text was perfectly Ok to appear on our home page-- we just decided to hide it years ago because we liked the photo-only look. I updated the text, which hadn't been touched for years, gave it some space so it would appear below the scroll, and made it visible.

We can now say we practice what we preach. Well, mostly.