The next test could be: Does google crawl hidden text (display:none, very small, very transparent colored text)?
My guess is they do crawl it because it can have legitimate uses, but if there is to much of them on a page then they give it a lower ranking.
I actually think the crawlers are more sophisticated than that. Recently I got an email from Google saying the text on my website was not big enough when browsing my site with a low resolution - which is why they choose to lower my rank on the results page. Clearly they have pretty advanced tests when it comes to accessibility of text, not only the content.
Is the argument that Google doesn't index hidden text, or that Google penalizes the use of hidden text?
This experiment proves what we knew -- Google indexes hidden text; however, it doesn't prove or test what people want to know -- if Google penalizes results that hide text.
Yes, it does take into account text that is hidden from view. This used to be (still is in some places) a deceptive tactic to rank a page higher in the search results. You could hide a massive block of keywords out of site of your visitor, or hide links to sites that you want ranking higher. Alternatively, more malicious people would (and still do) hack into a website in order to hide links in this same manner. The website owner isn't likely to notice them if they aren't visible on a page.
Google is pretty good at figuring out what is there for legitimate reasons versus spam.
Yeah, ultimately this doesn't demonstrate anything. We know Google can index text if it's hidden - the only issue with hidden/obfuscated text is that if Google determines it to be so, there's likely an SEO penalty to be paid.
The searches done here are so explicit that all it's demonstrating is that pages that are indexed by Google exist in the index. We have no information on how that would compare against competition (poorly, likely).
And to boot, OP may have degraded his/her own blog's overall SEO.
What you did is proofing that google indexes hidden text. What you did not proof is how that impacts your ranking. Google will know that this text is hidden, although it is indexed and that is what is important.
Sure, it indexes the text, but that has no bearing on SEO.
Most people using hidden text use it as a keyword stuffing tool, stuffing more relevant keywords into the page in order to get higher page rankings.
A lot of SEO techniques and how Google views them comes down to intent. It's pretty clear using hidden text and other gray and black hat methods will be picked up by Google and penalized because its clear the intent is to try and gain an advantage in the SERPS. This has been true going on ten years or more:
Cassandra — April 2003
Google cracked down on some basic link-quality issues, such as massive linking from co-owned domains. Cassandra also came down hard on hidden text and hidden links.
I just when back and checked, it's a png of blurred text so it isn't really cloaking. Google presumably can't see that text but it gets indexed from the question, the first answer and the first words of the other answers though. Either way it's a page that's mostly useless getting indexed. Are the results higher because Google thinks a series of images surrounded by relevant text probably have relevant content? Are the results higher from the days when they didn't blur and got a half decent page rank (all those links still pointing at them)? I think Google recalculates fairly frequently, and I personally haven't seen as much Quora in my searches - but it's hard to escape personalisation see the DuckDuckGo experiment - so maybe they are on the decline. That's another argument against them being a one billion dollar company though.
I don't think they do any such thing, if anything they are rotating IPs/user agents to avoid being limited or blocked.
Google requires sites to send the crawler the same content as someone clicking a link on a Google results page would see, so even if some sites get creative covering it up with blurred boxes and similar dark patterns, the data is there in the markup.
Pages crawled is a strange graph to post. The dramatic dropoff makes me think you have a crawling problem, not that google pegged u a content farm. Is google simply not crawling content farms? No they are ranking them lower but still crawling them.
It could be. But I would put my money on this being what it actually looks like: a way to test the waters on what kind of effect dropping visible URLs in results would have.
And if you work at Google, wouldn't you want to know? Maybe ask the search team and report back what you find, I'm really curious.
Google won't crawl it, but they can still include the link in search results, usually with the title guessed from the way it was referred to on another page, and no description.
I'm not sure, but Google could be unhappy with that. It'll look like you are trying to put a lot of keywords for the crawler that the users don't see and may classify the site as spammy.
Why do you think you would notice it? I imagine the only giveaway would be the url in status bar when you hover mouse over the link. If you are a programmer (or very pedant person) you might notice it, otherwise probably not.
Also, I hope they acted on some real-world statistics, provided by Google's or other crawlers...
You are not going to get a penalty for hidden text or trying to hide a text, you will still be indexed but that doesn't mean you will rank for what you are intending to rank for. Google is now miles better at detecting whats trying to trick it and whats not and if you try to compare these and see what ranks better the ones that are trying to hide stuff will rank much lower or wont rank for certain keywords.
I didn't read the comments, but the article didn't mention anything about Google plugins, did it?
I suppose it's possible Google used GA stats and maybe even content fingerprinting to determine if certain pages should be indexed, or reminded from the index, and how often to crawl them if indexed.
When hidden text and query are exact matches as well as unique, of course Google has no option but to show the only result it has.
What's important though is not that it's indexed or not. What's important is the weight that the text has on SEO ranking. I'd venture to guess that if two sites had the exact same text and one was hidden and the other wasn't, the latter would show higher in Google results.
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