Watching Google on Hidden Keywords

If you don’t monitor Matts Cutts blog, you should. He is the mouthpiece to our industry from Google. Here are his current words of wisdom:

If I were wondering why I didn’t show up in Google, I would review our webmaster
guidelines
and read the information listed under Don’t
load pages with irrelevant keywords.
As always, webmasters are free to do
what they want on their own sites, but Google reserves the right to do what we
think is best to maintain the relevance of our search results, and that includes
taking action on keyword stuffing.

When you read Matt’s full post you may get a laugh, but legitimate sites are using these techniques too. I just found a lawyer site that I do e-newsletters for that has white on white text on the home page stuffed with keywords.

You know some of these techniques used to be mainstream in our industry years ago to get placement, but now Google has gotten smart – very smart. If you use these techniques now, really you may be banned from Google as this one was. Then you’ll be hiring me to remediate your website and to contact Google and to get you back online. Services of that nature are expensive the best scenario is to simply not use them and to remove them if you are using them with a sense of urgency.