Webmaster Help Center

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

Hidden links are links that are intended to be crawled by Googlebot, but are unreadable to humans because:

If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages. When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that's not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?

If you're using text to try to describe something search engines can't access - for example, Javascript, images, or Flash files - remember that many human visitors using screen readers, mobile browsers, browsers without plug-ins, and slow connections will not be able to view that content either. Using descriptive text for these items will improve the accessibility of your site. You can test accessibility by turning off Javascript, Flash, and images in your browser, or by using a text-only browser such as Lynx. Some tips on making your site accessible include:

If you do find hidden text or links on your site, either remove them or, if they are relevant for your site's visitors, make them easily viewable. If your site has been removed from our search results, review our webmaster guidelines for more information. Once you've made your changes and are confident that your site no longer violates our guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration.

If you'd like to discuss this with Google, or have ideas for how we can better communicate with you about it, please post in our webmaster discussion forum.