Google INvisibility

chuckinsocal

Hi Gang,

Several months ago I followed the conventional wisdom and created a hidden <div> in my bio and packed it with keywords for Google to find. In fact I created two <div>s, one focusing on SoCal Images and the other focusing on the work I did with cars a while back.

Today, I did a Google search on some of my keywords and I showed up absolutely no where on the first ten pages of Google results.

I can do a search on my name and my site shows up all over the first one or two pages of the search results. People are finding my cars by searching for a specific car such as 1957 Chevy Convertible, etc. These are in the individual photo captions. So Google does know how to find my site, just not by the keywords in my bio.

Where'd I go wrong with the keywords in my bio? :dunno I'm thinking that I should create some hidden divs in my photo captions and put some site related keywords there. Maybe that'll that work better? :scratch

As always, thank you for sharing your wisdom.

Andy

ALready answered you here http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=926728#post926728

chuckinsocal

Thanks Andy but that's a different thread addressing a different issue but I responded to your response there.

chuckinsocal

Bumpity Bump Bump
This is making no sense to me ... I started this thread to ask about keyword divs and why mine didn't seem to be working. Andy responded in an unrelated thread seemingly while I was typing my OP in this thread . See the link in his response here. So I responded to Andy's response in the other thread. Now both threads have died as related to my original issue. How do we put this back together because neither my original question nor my response to Andy has been answered. Thanks.

Andy

K did you remove the keywords from your bio meta statement?

Photo keywords are enough Google luvz em

chuckinsocal

Andy,

As I responded yesterday, I had no intent to put those keywords in a meta tag. My only intent was to have them in my bio only so I have no idea they would show up in a meta tag. How do I remove them from the meta tag but still have them in my bio for Google to find? And why would Google ignore those keywords when the conventional wisdom here is to do what I had done? My keyword div is

. Is that perhaps a site wide div so SM automatically puts them in the meta tag? I didn't even think we had access to the meta tags. I shouldn't be this confused but I am.

Thanks.

timnosenzo

Andy wrote:

Photo keywords are enough Google luvz em

Agreed, if Google thinks you're "keyword spamming" them, they could penalize your site and not rank it well.

chuckinsocal

Thanks Tim. I am aware of keyword spamming and I thought I avoided that. See my response to Andy above.

chuckinsocal

Thanks Tim. I am aware of keyword spamming and I tried to avoid that. See my response to Andy above.

Edit: OK ... by looking at the source of your home page I'm seeing that your bio text is showing up in both the meta tag and in your home page html. So now I'm thinking that the conventional wisdom of creating a hidden div in the bio and packing it with keywords is bogus in that it leads to keyword spamming ?

onethumb

chuckinsocal wrote:

Thanks Tim. I am aware of keyword spamming and I tried to avoid that. See my response to Andy above.

Edit: OK ... by looking at the source of your home page I'm seeing that your bio text is showing up in both the meta tag and in your home page html. So now I'm thinking that the conventional wisdom of creating a hidden div in the bio and packing it with keywords is bogus in that it leads to keyword spamming ?

*Anything* that causes "hidden" text on your page can easily cause Google to dump you from their index entirely.

Google's entire "secret sauce" revolves around only indexing data relevant to humans - so hidden text fields get penalized, since humans don't see them.

chuckinsocal

Thanks Don ... I'm not disputing you but that conflicts with the advice commonly given by highly knowlegable and credible contirbutors here to create a div, put search words in it for the search engines to find, then hide it with display:none in CSS such as in this post or here in the Gotcha section here. What am I missing? I need to be disconfused.

Edit: Here it is straight from the horses mouth:

Google092208.jpg

So, contrary to all the advice given in the past, apparently it is a very bad practice to hide search words in a div. Go Figure. I'm guessing I've been banned from Google for following said advice. Now I gotta go fix it and resubmit to Google. Oh Joy. :bash .

Edit #2
I need to take it all back. I just dug into Google Webmaster Tools and find that my pages are listed, including all the keywords in the hidden div, it's just that my site just has a real low page rank. So the object of the game now is to increase my page rankings. I really don't have that many incoming links so I guess I'll start there. Need to look for other ways, too. Thanks to all who helped and I apologize for any confusion I may have caused. Webmastering is hard.