Why Display: None Isn’t The Panacea You Might Hope For

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 27 of April , 2008 at 7:52 pm

A reader asked what I thought about the practice of using the display: none attribute in CSS to hide text. Generally speaking, hiding text on a web page is a method of keyword stuffing that search engines frown upon. You might get away with it in the short term, but don’t expect to be able to get away with it forever. Some search engine optimization gurus are always looking for ways to outsmart the search engines and get their web pages ranked higher and faster. That’s like trying to find a better way to rob banks. You might succeed, but keep robbing banks long enough and you’ll eventually get caught.

Over at search engine land, Eric Enge wrote a fabulous article on the legitimate use of the display: none attribute. Then he encouraged his readers to use the tactic to hide text on their web pages. Here’s a snippet:

The legitimate use of this technique is so prevalent that I would rarely expect search engines to penalize a site for using the display: none attribute. It’s just very difficult to implement an algorithm that could truly ferret out whether the particular use of display: none is meant to deceive the search engines or not.

I’m no expert on creating algorithms, but my guess is what is difficult today may be quite common next year or next month. At one time, it was difficult to clone cells. But then came Dolly the sheep. It was once difficult to land on the moon, then came along John F. Kennedy and Neil Armstrong. It was once difficult to run a 4-minute mile, but then Roger Bannister gave health experts a heart attack and did the impossible. Now, his record has been broken and the 4-minute mile is common place. Even The Bandit did what they said couldn’t be done.

The point is, it may be difficult today to create an algorithm that will catch the illegitimate use of display: none to hide text on your web pages, but that doesn’t mean search engines will never do it. They caught link farms, didn’t they? They caught URL cloakers. And Google is constantly updating its algorithms to make link building more difficult for spammers. I’m guessing that they could eventually discover a way to ferret out legitimate and illegitimate uses of a particular tactic. Even if they don’t, by employing such techniques, you are leaving yourself open to further scrutiny should the search engines see other red flags. The more risk you take in your SEO tactics, the more likely you are to run afoul of the search engines. They don’t have to rank you at all.

Category: SEO, Search Engines

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