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"Invisible text works just fine, in this case I was referring to text that would be covered by the image, and thus would be treated identically to the text you propose using."

Riiight. That makes a lot more sense. I assumed by "invisible text" you meant setting the foreground text to the same colour as the background - the technique that every beginner SEOer reads about. This has been detected by Googlebot (and several other search engines) for years, and (because it's only ever really used for gaming the search engines) reduces the attractiveness of your site to them.

When this became well-known to blackhat SEOs, the usual technique changed to including text in a block-level element, but use CSS to set its X or Y co-ordinates to negative (or large positive) values.

I should mention that my current knowledge is a good couple of months out of date, but last I heard Google was also likely (everything in SEO is a bit vague, because the search engines modify their algorithms so frequently to avoid gaming them) downgrading keywords found in display:none or visibility:hidden text, for similar reasons.

Think about it - you're a search engine, and your one job is to maximise relevent results and minimize spam.

Your readers are viewing what's shown on the page, so this is only what's of interest to you. You can either treat invisible text as normal text (for no gain either way), or you can downgrade the importance of hidden text, slightly or a lot.

If you downgrade hidden text, you score some (but, to be fair, very few) "legitimate" pages slightly lower than they would otherwise be if all instances of their keywords were taken into account. However, spam pages (which typically use large amounts of hidden text, certainly compared to legitimate uses like custom "tooltips" or navigation menus) loose out a lot... a net gain in relevancy for your results.

Remember, Google isn't trying to maximise the number of results it returns for a given keyword, it's trying to differentiate between the relevant and spammy pages. Frankly, you could probably ignore all text with visibility:hidden or display:none, and still see a large jump in relevance.

"But of course you only advocate CSS, you don't actually have any clue how to use it."

Aaaah, baseless abuse. Constructive and persuasive.

"There are dozens of ways to make search engines see text that most browsers don't display, and most of them still work great."

There are indeed many ways of rendering text invisible that, as far as we know, don't hurt your rankings (or the text's value) in Google and other search engines.

Some, like setting foreground_colour=background_colour are already detected and penalised. Some, like visibility:hidden or display:none may or may not be penalised, or may only be penalised slightly since they have non-illicit uses.

However, the fact remains there are techniques which will flag your page as "spammy". Not every use of even one of these techniques will shitlist a page, but when enough (varies by search engine, but under 10) are used together, your page will be flagged and either reduced drastically in ranking, or de-listed altogether.

I'd love to point you at some beginner SEO resources, but there aren't many that are both comprehensive and up-to-date. SEOing is presently an industry dominated by charlatans and con-men, and anyone who knows anything about it (white or black-hat) is getting paid big bucks to do it, and has little or no interest in sharing the information since as soon as any given trick becomes public knowledge the search engines change their algorithms to prevent it working.

All I can recommend is that you read SEO "industry" forums like www.webmasterworld.com or blogs like GoogleGuySays . Oh, and also to not let your knee-jerk hatred of XHTML bigots lead you into arguments on subjects you obviously know little about... ;-)

Some nice stuff here.

As seen on this discussion and this website.

Reminds me a bit of a certan guy at SCO...

Sure enough, my clickthroughs jumped considerably. So much so, in fact, that I earned another $100 in about a week. This morning I got an email from Google stating that they'd disabled my account due to "Invalid clicks". I had not violated any of the terms: I hadn't clicked my own ads, I hadn't used bots, I hadn't offered incentives to anyone else to click them. All I'd done is follow their own optimisation tips.

I sent an email saying this and got another automated response, stating that their "proprietary algorithm" mean that they couldn't elaborate as to what these invalid clicks were, but they were nevertheless disabling my account and witholding all payment.

I spoke to a few of the users of my site, who said that yes, many of them had been clicking ads more. Some said that they'd gone on to buy things through these clicks. None had used bots or anything: they'd just clicked on the ads as any user might, because they were more noticable now and many of the targetted ads were amusing or interesting.

My reply to their second canned email has gone unanswered, and I'm left down the $200-$250 that was remaining in my account, and it seems I have been hosting Google's ads for over a year for free. It seems that I'm far from the only person to experience this arbitrary account cancellation:

• http://www.ypjain.com/anand/2005/07/google-adsense -nonsense.html
• http://www.markcarey.com/googleguy-says/archives/d iscuss-adsense-invalid-clicks-process.html
• http://info-x.co.uk/vfarch8361.htm
• http://www.trap17.com/index.php/google-adsense_t65 44.html

There's discussion on the Mars Rover Discussion Board and again. It seems careful Rover Watchers noticed that it hadn't moved in a few days, and started to wonder why. Apparently NASA had to say something, because people were asking questions.

There's discussion on the Mars Rover Discussion Board and again. It seems careful Rover Watchers noticed that it hadn't moved in a few days, and started to wonder why. Apparently NASA had to say something, because people were asking questions.

You're not kidding!

There was spy/scumware that did that, editing the hosts files to redirect google.com and other search engines to themselves (hiding at http://64.191.95.139 - now offline) instead.

I haven't heard anyone mention it, but the trojan.qHost "virus" (not a virus at all) is pretty nasty, and seems to be changing all the time. It only effects IE right now. It changed your DNS settings, and creates a hijacking "hosts" file so that all search engines (google, yahoo, hotbot, excite) end up at another webserver. It took me about a week to figure out what was going on, and from the look of things other people are stuck on it. It's being called a virus, but really it's hijack-ware. And once you've caught it, it's really hard to do a search to find out what's going on. There's a small discussion on GoogleGuys site (seems to be shrinking ?), and a trojan.qHost information/removal page at BiteSize.