Spamming search engines with invisible text

Got some SMS spam from my current spouse telling me she found the “chaise lounge” she was (apparently) looking for and “could she buy it while it was a bargain of a lifetime?”.

“Chaise lounge?”, I said. “What’s that?”, thinking of a popular nightclub here in Melbourne.

“Google it”, she says.

That’s when I stumble across Egamma Modern Masters, proudly proclaiming themselves as “the home of modern furniture”. The first thing I notice is some large black text which flashes before my eyes and then disappears, only to be replaced by their stellar example of minimalist design:

“That’s odd”, I say to myself. “Big, black text which disappears, huh?”. Suspecting that these clowns could have got some bad advice from their SEO people and resorted to some good old-fashioned keyword stuffing, an ancient trick which attempts to improve rankings by spamming the search engines, I couldn’t resist having a closer look.

Viewing the source code of the page shows this:

<h2 class="h2headertxt">modern furnture,contempary furniture,
mies van der rohe, le corbusier,eileen gray, isamu noguchi,
arne jacobsen,eero saarinen,marcel breuer, charles &amp;
ray eames,harry bertoia,josef hoffmann,eero aarnio,nelson,
retro furniture,modern classics,bauhaus</h2>

The associated stylesheet shows the "h2headertxt" class to have the following declaration:

.h2headertxt { font-size: 8px; color: #ffffff; }

Apart from the obvious misspellings, there are couple of shenanigans worth taking a note of here:

1. The “h2″ header tag is actually in the header of the document, not in the body, where it should be. This is why the big, black text briefly flashes before your eyes.

2. The stylesheet then kicks in and resizes the header text to 8 pixels and alters the colour to white, effectively making it invisible against the white background.

Experience tells me that even though the text is rendered invisible and very small, because it was used in the header, it should be still possible to view it. Using the old “Ctrl++” trick in my preferred browser, I can see that the gap between the top of my browser window and their logo is significantly larger, enabling me to select it and show how the search engine spiders see the page:

Will I report these jokers for their unethical tactics? Why don’t you check their website again in about a weeks time and see if anything’s changed.

And what happened to the “chaise lounge”? It’s on it’s way.

Posted in Business, Google, Marketing, Web by Ivan