Percieved Hidden Text...

[stretch dog]

I have a question for some of you more experienced seo people.

There is a blog that i am responsible. I wont post the link because it is adult in nature. Not porn, but rather adult oriented products.

The site has no hidden text, yet when i view the search engine's cached pages, there is some text that is the same color as the back ground.

The site uses css to define the font colors etc, so I can only assume that althought the site appears ok to the viewer, the search engines are somehow getting the wrong information from the css.

I hope this doesn't sound like too stupid a question (I am not a designer or programmer) but I need to know if this is a problem... meaning, do the search engines actually think there is "hidden" text?

Thank you in advance for your help... SD

[Jabber_uk]

I'd like to throw something esle into the pot here too:

Many computers do not seem to display the difference between #666666 and #999999 for instance. So what about #9D9D9D and #A1A1A1?

Would the engines see these as the same colour?

What colour depth do the engines read to?

[stretch dog]

What, is everyone on holidays this week... ?

Figured someone would have taken the time to suggest i check to see how the cached page displays in other browsers... lol.

Anyways, think i answered my own original post. When i view the same cached page in Fire Fox i see no hidden text, so i can only assume that IE is the issue and in fact the search engines are not seeing hidden text that is not really hidden at all.

Seemed important enough to me at the time to ask... perhaps someone could still explain how the search engines determine when there is hidden text present... and if its possible for an engine to incorrectly flag text as hidden when in fact it actually is not hidden at all?

SD

[Jabber_uk]

I would be interested too - perhaps noone knows? hehehe

[Webnauts]

stretch dog can you send me the URL per PM?

[Webnauts]

stretch dog I tested on-the-fly the blog, and I can only tell so far the following problems:

1. Improper Use of Tables
Your web design appears to be using nested table elements. Nested tables are often used to improperly control the layout of a web page, and are no longer used in modern web design. All layouts should be controlled by CSS. Furthermore, nested tables can break up the semantic order of a web page, and also unnecessarily increase the page size.


2. Download Size/Time
The size of your HTML is 173.57KB
Your web page is over 100KB and needs to be optimized! Search engines, like Google, reward web designs that make an effort to reduce the size of their web pages. Also, condensed content helps search engines better target your web page for specific keywords.

Total Page Size

It's always important to pay attention to your total page size. If your other files (like images and scripts) are large, it may make your website load slowly for users who do not have broadband connections. In general, it's good practice to try to keep your web pages as small as possible.

* HTML: 173.57KB
* Images: 756.03KB
* CSS: 4.77KB

Total: 934.36KB

3. Outgoing Links
Your web page doesn't appear to be using the rel="nofollow" anchor attribute. It's important to use this attribute for outgoing links that you cannot verify, are not related to the content of your web page, and/or link to untrusted spammy web pages. Otherwise, search engines may penalize your web page for links they deem to be untrustworthy and/or spammy.

You blog and the other web site are not in the sandbox or banned though. Just FYI. :)

[stretch dog]

Thanks for taking a look Webnauts.

The size of the main index and category index pages can be configured quite easily. Currently I have them set for 50 posts per page, down from the 100 posts per page it was configured for until recently... I can realistically reduce the number yet further if you feel the pages are still too large.

If I go to just 30 posts, it will reduce the page size down to about 60% of what you saw, and about 30% of what the search engines were seeing until just a few short weeks ago.

The individual post pages are of course much smaller as they include just a single post and attached comments, which makes them easier for the search engines to theme.

I've also changed the code in the template for these pages to use the post title for the page's title tag and keyword tag... and i've written a short generic description tag that also will insert the post title in a manner as to be appropriate as description tag.

Previously, all these individual archived posts shared a common title and set of meta tags... which of course did nothing to help the search engines determine what the pages were about. The thing is, that its a typepad blog, and as such comes with limited potential for optimization.

As for the nested tables, css etc... all our website layouts use full css, of course, but with the blog we are sort of stuck with what they use... even using advanced templates, the typepad interface has it's limitations when compared to a standard webpage... which means i think i am at a loss to be doing anything about the nested tables... this is something it does by default and i doubt is within my control to change.

Further input on this matter would be appreciated, as would anybody's comments as to How Better to Optimize a Type Pad Blog... i do see other typepad blogs coming up in the serps.

As for the rel="nofollow"... yes, as i stated in my pm to you, i have been considering adding them to all our "site wide links" that are pointing to our product site pages.

Its not that these links are not verified, or that they point to unrelated content and/or link to untrusted spammy web pages... but simply because they are "site wide" links pointing to one of our own sites... and I have been led to believe that its not a good idea to have "site wide links" pointing to you.

I wish to leave them there for natural and related navigation, but can use the "nofollow" attribute to tell the search engines that the links are there for traffic, not for link popularity or as an attempt to improve the ranking of our product site.

Is this appropriate to do so... as it is not exactly what the attribute was originally intended for?

Again, i appreciate you having a look, and if you see anything else let me know.

SD

Ps... something else i discovered recently is that the blog was generating a single h1 tag for every post, which means the main and category index pages which were displaying 100 posts, where all generating 100 h1's per page (50 after i reduced the number of posts per page)... now there is only one per page, which i am hoping will eventually help our ranking.

It makes sense that any page with 100 h1's is going to be flagged by the search engines i would think... lol