I have to first credit this initial find to Mel Nelson, who brought something he found to my attention on the phone this morning.

After looking at a number of sites that I could find that have this issue in their code, I am finding it to be extremely true.

Now we know that google states they went after CSS spam with Jagger, yet nobody seems to know exactly how or what happened. They especially don't understand why a lot of perfectly good sites dropped into the crapper.

Google stated the truth. But people were and still are looking in the wrong places. You are all looking at CSS tricks such as modifying the size of H tags, or modifying other minor facets that you think can affect the SERPS.

However, what many of you did not look at is extremely simple and rather obvious. So simple it is on thousands of websites in a perfectly natural way of using it. Also a very valid way of using it, while not intending to spam search engines.

If you have read this far, thn read on, because the very simple thing they did go after in force apparently is hidden div's. It is really that simple. Many spammers hide text, and links in hidden div's to hide it from a humans view, yet still allow the search engines to see it. If you look around, you will see many trashed sites that used hidden div's, many of them perfectly innocent, and still unknowing as to why they dropped. Hidden div's have valid uses, like drop down navigation systems, or even slide in and popup menu's, however a great many sites using this method were dumped into the crapper, as well as some spam sites.

What amazes me is that it took this long to find it. There are no posts on any forum I have seen addressing this, and Mel has said the same.

Your thoughts?

Is this where I go "Son Of A Bitch!!"?? WTF were they thinking??

I just checked an old site of ours that uses div tags for menuing.. It has used them for almost as long as they have been available.. The site has been all but delisted from Google now.. Right now they show just 4 of our pages in the index..

Ok, rant over.. Now, the real issue is do we ride this out an hope that they fix it for do we start rewriting menus so that we can get back in their good graces??

Just what I needed to see right before Christmas..

Oh - the url http://www.duocor.com

I really am starting to hate Google.. I need to call a fw people right now and let them know that we may need to redesign their site..

I have not looked at nor thought about the problem being hidden div's but if this is what Google has done then I can understand there reason for going back to pre-Jagger results.

Seems Google would have thought this through a little more.

Feyd yep that would qualify for what we have seen on others.

#elnav {position:absolute; visibility:hidden;}

Nothing wrong with your usage at all. perfectly valid reason for using it. caught in the crossfire.

Wait for 8-9 hours til Mel wakes up again. He has a way of doing it that was not affected. I am sure he will share the code.

I'm sure he will, but I'm not fixing perfectly good sites to make google happy for free.. Especially this time of year.. I need to let Shannon know what is going on and his options.. It's only 7am there so I don't expect to get to talk with him for 3 or 4 more hours anyway..

You know, there are some days when I'm glad I don't build sites full time anymore.. This would be one of them

Now I never use these type of menus - just not my style, but if could be a very simple fix I would think.

If google is looking for divs that are "hidden", then just delete that so all the divs show, then use javascript in an onload to hide them all. Google can't read that javascript as far as I know.

If this is a viable solution, you could fix them all in 5 minutes.

I can imagine

We have been blogged: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002971.html

That actually may be feasable, however Google has been playing with reading javascript as well, tho i do not know how far they have gotten yet with that.

On that blog it says...



Now if I was a SE one of the first things I would do ever to prevent spam would be to penalize sites that do this. If part of the page is contained in a different file, but you don't want me to see it, I would assume you are trying to hide something... cheating. But that is if I were a SE -

Can the spider crawl the external CSS anyway? I mean it is not like crawling another page, it is part of the same page that it is crawling.

Spiders crawl PAGES? Robots.txt Block FILES? Something is weird with this to me.

Hmmm, not something I had added.. I guess I need to talk with them about who else is working on the site

Even saying that though, the site did rank, and at one time it ranked well.. The only pages it shows now are the cookiecheck.html (wonder what's in there) and the pdf file.. Even more crap to sort through.. \0/

IMO there is nothing wrong with using hidden divs for menu systems and for page design purposes, so long as the content of the hidden div is normally accessible to viewers as well as search engines.

Google have thrown the baby out with the bathwater -- again.

I do see some ways of doing the same thing but in a more sophisticated way that seem to have passed unscathed, but revealing what it is in an SEO forum may be the best way to get it included in the next google bash.

ROFL. Will remember the keyword site that Dustin and I embarked upon several months ago and he never got around to really completing?

www.dailykeyword.com. If I recall correctly he purposely used CSS to load adword listing that he wanted to have displayed. HAH...! I bet a million that site, if it did anything on the engines (never checked and don't care much to now.) isn't doing much now lol.

My $0.02

Hopefully they will fix this. Great find Will and Mel.

Mel and Will. I came into it second.

hmmm, the number 2 site on google for "chicago wedding photography" has a hidden div

BTW, do you really get penalized for changing the font size of H tags? This just wrong to have the look and feel of your site dictated to you.

I have not seen anyone get penalized for it. But I have seen theories galore saying you will.

Yes that site does have a hidden div but if you look at the text cache for that page you will see that its blank.

It may be that the page is ranking well on its inbound links only.

As Mel pointed out, it does look like google is not directly penalizing sites for it, however they have removed all benefit it gave those sites. In the case of menu systems it removes all internal links effectively. On sites which had hidden copy, it removes that and makes sure it is not counted for ranking benefit.

I did a site search for that site and it showed one result. I wondered why so I looked at the cacheto see how Googlebot saw the site.

Poor Googlebot gets reprimanded with this:


So, it seems like a case of mistaken blame. That is likely the case with the other sites that got dropped but are looking at the wrong cause. In that site's case, it doesn't look like it was being penalized, but rather, it was keeping Googlebot out.

This was already shown for his case above that the cookies were his main issue.

As for the hidden div, it is easily verified by just doing a search for sites which have visibility: hidden and checking the cache to see that google has removed all the hidden text/links/copy.

It is not mistaken blame as the hidden div stuff has been proven out by quite a few people since we posted it.

It was mentioned what a person saw but it wasn't confirmed about how spiders were treated.

Anyway, not related, but the menus don't work in Firefox. I thought there was a change to remove the popout menus because nothing happened when I hovered over them. Then I checked in IE and saw how it was supposed to be.

We are talking with them about a major site redesign after the 1st of the year.. Primarily to get rid of the cookie thing someone else added recently to "make it easier for return buyers".. I doubt we will get rid of the menu system though.. It may get a small rewrite, but will most likely stay in place..

Thanks to those that browse with fringe browsers and cookies off for spoting that for me

I was just trying to help with your other visitors who use Firefox. It's not like I am going to visit the site frequently. And I wouldn't want to do business with a company that has your attitude. Even web designers doing it for fun, without pay, are considerate to non-IE... even Opera, which has a smaller user base than Firefox. Think about it. The demographic of non-IE users are techier. Techier people tend to make more money. Money you seem happy to turn down because you don't want to write code that works across different browsers.

With Google paying AdSense publishers to refer people to Firefox, the number of users aren't going to exactly diminish.

Actually most CSS navigation using this method do work fine in FF, Opera, Safari, etc. Not sure why his doesn't work in yours.

Perhaps this menu system has been changed by whoever made all the other changes on the site since Feydakin originally built it, as what I am seeing is not a DHTML menu per se', but an image map which produces a menu by way of a popup when you mouseover a linked area.

The use of the image map might account for no spidering, and I really don't see how the popups could ever be spidered.

And of course the reason it doesn't work in Firefox (which I confirm) is that Firefox blocks popups.

Thanks Mel,

Even more reasons to rebuild the site.. Hopefully our bill will convince him to stop letting little Jimmy, the janitor's neice's neighbor who knows something about web design, stop 'playing' with the site.. When I finished this site more than 2 years ago we were doing very well across the board.. Since I stepped away from full time participation in the company 3 years ago I haven't kept track of most of our customers.. Looks like it's time to take a more active role..

And tranzdance, that's ok, I still won't consider making other browsers a primary, or even secondary, consideration when building sites.. So much of the internet population has no clue how to install a new browser that they are more than enough for most of our clients.. That's my attitude and I'm sticking to it

Steve -

I agree with you about that.


You are mistaken. I don't do it "for fun", and I sure as hell don't make any attempt to support non-standard browsers like the ones you mentioned. In fact on the front page of one of my sites, it states very clearly that the site doesn't support non-standard browsers.

It's nobody else's business if a site owner chooses to ignore a section of people. Personally I choose to cater for the vast majority of people, and ignore the rest, and it's entirely my own business if I choose to turn down the small change that the rest might bring my way..

guys pls can you give me an idea what is a jagger?