Hidden Text on Websites

[livetech]

I know it's considered a general no no for hidden text, but I'm just wondering if it goes against accessibility issues.

Reason is, most of us on our various websites have a graphical header image.
As the graphical header image is within a DIV usually, then we can't put text there, as the text could mess up the layout.

What we used to do was put in the title and description of the website in a h1 tag, then set the h1 tag in the css to display:none. This was not done to game google, this was done so that if people were using screen reader software, or simply have an old browser, the the site could be browsed easily.

We now evaluate it on a project by project basis (usually governmental sites/legal sites we still adopt this methodology), but generally do not do this, after we've heard that Google doesn't like hidden text.

Do you do this on your site? Are we being overly cautious? Or simply having even 1-2 lines of hidden text means that we're shooting ourselves in the foot google wise?

[vicdigi]

Originally Posted by livetech

I know it's considered a general no no for hidden text, but I'm just wondering if it goes against accessibility issues.

Reason is, most of us on our various websites have a graphical header image.
As the graphical header image is within a DIV usually, then we can't put text there, as the text could mess up the layout.

Is the graphical header image a link as well?

[livetech]

Not usually, usually just a h1 tag.

[vicdigi]

I see. I was thinking along the lines of logo image!
Anyhow, if the image can be turned into a link I may have the perfect solution for you - and it is not blackhat SEO either!

Visit: My cached page at Google and hover above our logo...

Hope this helps, let me know what you think.
Vic

[ohsuria]

How many H1 tag you have in your page?
imho, I think google like a page that only has 1 H1 tag.

[OldWelshGuy]

Alt text attribute is there for accessibility, and setting CSS to display none is against the T&C same as absolute positioning off page is as well. . be very careful.

[BenjArriola]

Whitehat Point of View:
CSS image text replacement is fine as long as the text on the image is exactly the same as the hidden text.

Blackhat Point of View:
The is no other valuable thing a blackhat can do but add in more text that is not appearing on the image itself. This cannot be detected right away by the bots. Usually it is someone that reports it on Google's Spam Report and needs some manual inspection by someone from Google. If none of your competitors see it and no one submits a spam report, then you are not yet in doom. But eventually you might be in the future.

My personal point of view:
If you are doing SEO for your clients and want to keep your clients for life, or at least as long as possible, then stick with the whitehat way since it goes a long way.

Going back to your question on CSS image-text replacement. Yes you can do that.

[forums]

My 2 cents:

The text in a banner might be more appropriate to the document TITLE.

For example, say you ran a web site selling shoes: Put the company name in the TITLE and in your graphical banner and then use the H1 tag for something more relevant than the company name.

[forums]

Originally Posted by ohsuria

How many H1 tag you have in your page?
imho, I think google like a page that only has 1 H1 tag.

I agree - I'd stick to one H1 per page. It's not part of any specification (i.e. XHTML) but even the BBC suggest it in their standards and guidelines (bbc.co.uk/guidelines/newmedia/).

[KingPin]

So your saying text in an image is more "powerful" than the Title tag?

And only stick to 1 H1 tag? as you'll see, they are only guidelines

And I thought Sunday's were boring lol.

KP