Today’s installment of “What Not to Do for SEO” is all about hidden text.
For quite some time, one of the most popular ways to try to scheme the search engines was to hide a bunch of text on a background of the same color (e.g. white text on a white background). This is bad news because spammers figured out that they could fill their page with keywords so that Google would fine them, but that normal readers like you would never be able to see. Luckily, Google figured out exactly what people were doing, and began punishing sites that took part in this practice.
The takeaway: Don’t try to hide things from Google – it will hurt you!