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Re: Skip links and SEO

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From: Patrick Lauke
Date: May 2, 2007 8:40AM

> However, a colleague of mine had been to an SEO conference,
> where she was
> told flat out that you should never ever hide text, otherwise
> it will hurt
> your Google rankings.

Bullsh*t. Sorry, I meant...urban myth. There is no evidence to suggest this. There is also no evidence to suggest that Googlebot and similar crawlers actively analyse a page and its CSS to try to divine if something is hidden or not (and, with the myriad of different ways of doing this in CSS, it would be a significant performance hit, if possible at all). Google and co. still rely on human intervention, i.e. somebody noticing that a page has something like 3 pages of keywords at the end of the actual document, but styled as hidden, and for that person to then contact Google, who will evaluate whether or not there's some shady practice and take punitive action if necessary. This is, from what I remember, what happened to BMW's site in Germany a few months ago...somebody noticed, blew the whistle to Google, and Google penalised the site by dropping their rank...manually.

P