Hiding text on your page: super smart or oil stupid?

But after being asked 4 different questions again over the past few weeks like "can't we put white letters on a white background letters?" or "can't we hide the text on a page?", it's about time.

Why do customers ask these kinds of questions?

There are actually two reasons why I get the question about whether hiding text by placing, say, white text on a white background is a good idea.

Reason 1: Some clients really have no idea how Google works and think that Google sees the website the way we see it.

Reason 2: clients are doing SEO themselves, already understand a little more about it and are trying to come up with clever tricks to fool Google.

Acting on these arguments does your online position no good, and so a bit of education and transfer of SEO knowledge is necessary. This is because it is important to us that the client knows what we can do, knows what we do, and above all, knows what it delivers.

So download our free E-book and learn all about search engine optimization. And for reason 2, we will also go over the chapter that says that SEO does not consist of cleverness and that we cannot fool Google. ????

The reason why you might want to hide text on a page

Suppose it did work (which it did 10-15 years ago), when would you want to hide your content?

When I look at the websites I've ever worked with and hidden that text and when I look at all the people who have ever asked me something like this, you can roughly divide it into three categories:

1. They want, without changing anything on the page, to rank higher with this page by incorporating additional (search) words.
2. They don't want so much text on a new page. They don't like this.
3. They have read or heard that this once worked.

Never hide content/text: Google is too smart!

Let me get you out of your dream right away; you are never going to fool Google.

It's a billion-dollar company with a gigantic smart machine. Every trick you come up with has already been thought of and a solution for it has already been thought of.

If you hide the text by making it white, for example, then nothing appears to be wrong from the front. But Google doesn't just look at the front end.

Google also looks at the back end of your website. The code. So there Google sees all the text is in a place that is not normal in a color that is unusual.

Next, Google sees that your background is also white. A 1+1=2. So Google will quickly punish you for this.

And what does that punishment entail? Lower rankings and you might even get thrown out of indexing if you get very out of line.