This will probably result in a penalty for your website – you might be doing it for purposes to increase rankings – or without knowing it.
Hidden text occurs when you have a white background color of your website and white text. Or black background with black text. In other words there’s text but visitors cannot read it.
Search engines can still read it though – and that’s why you get penalty.
Years ago and still today some webmasters use hidden text, just to place a ton of keywords for the search engines to see. To get high rankings.
So if you give a check on your website it will be a great idea.
Hidden text or for any other penalty you will be probably notified on your Google webmaster tools account. If you are trying to cheat though and it’s obvious you’re not going to be notified.
The rule here is: Show search engines and visitors the same thing.
That’s also why redirects are “bad” sometimes. You should use the 301 permanent redirect only – if you have to use redirects. That’s also why cloaking or creating doorway pages and other black hat techniques no longer work.
There were legitimate cases where Google informed the webmaster and he fixes the problem with hidden text. And penalty after some short time will be gone. Penalty usually is drop in rankings. But if your website lost rankings it’s not always a penalty of course.
Always have a Google webmaster tools account to get notified of any WARNINGS your website might have – things you can do better… or any penalties you have. Even if your website is hacked you get notified. In that case even via email.
Something interesting is that many webmasters kinda worry when they read posts like… Google removed from their Google guidelines the following:
* Have other relevant sites link to yours.
* Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.
Now that at first may sound alerting… but it does not mean Google algorithm no longer “like” these links.
In fact one of the ways to get high rankings is getting other relevant sites to link to yours. It’s what’s working right now!
A Yahoo submission will boost your rankings in Yahoo and in Google has obviously the benefit of a quality one way link from high pr website (considered as authority site as well) – and I’ve seen increase in rankings up till this day with directory submissions. These still work – you can interpret what Google had in mind when they removed those bullets from the Guidelines!
What works is what matters.
If you stop getting relevant links your rankings have no other way to increase.
