Wondering how to see hidden text on a website? One of the first black hat strategies used to enhance page ranking in search results was to hide text and links. If you believe that adding hidden links and content would enhance traffic to your website, you will quickly learn that this tactic is unsuccessful and might even harm your website.
The process of showing a distinct set of information or links to site visitors and search engines is known as content cloaking. For a brief period, this method of improving page ranking—having search engines crawl hidden connections and text on the webpage—worked.
But that’s no longer the case because search engine ranking algorithms are much more advanced and can quickly spot unethical tactics that could lead to a website being penalized.
Hidden Text: What Is It?
Search engine spiders can access hidden text on a web page even when it is fully invisible to humans. Hidden text is a type of content spam intended to boost a website’s on-page SEO ranking signals.
When using these techniques in the past, webmasters would stuff the text of their web pages with specific keywords while keeping the users in the dark. Currently, if search engines find concealed language on the website, this technique might get rather messy.
Why do you wish to uncover hidden text and links?
There are several reasons you might want to locate hidden content or links on a website, including the following:
- If there are any hidden links or content on your website, you should check it.
- You wish to check a potential customer’s website for criminal activity.
- Or you wish to expose or report a rival for utilizing unethical strategies
- You want to know if search engine developers or rivals can manually find your (illegally hidden) text and links.
What resources are necessary to locate hidden text and links?
There are numerous techniques you can employ to uncover concealed content and links. Some of the quickest methods involve pressing “ctrl-a” (select all). This is to see whether any previously concealed text or links now appear.
This trick, however, only reveals text and links that have been concealed using the tried-and-true strategy. Such as having them the same color as the backdrop. The strategies used to conceal links and content have evolved, and so should our toolkit.
To uncover hidden text and links, we will thus expose you to a potent toolkit. One that includes Firefox and the Web Developer Toolbar.
Best practices for making text and links hidden
More than 100 separate settings are included in the web developer toolbar as standard. So they can be utilized in conjunction. We did that for you so you wouldn’t have to touch all those amazing buttons! The top 10 methods for using the web developer toolbar to make hidden links and text visible are shown below:
- Disable > Javascript > All Javascript
- Turn off > Page Colors
- CSS > Disable Styles > All Styles
- Pictures > Turn off images > All Images
- Images > Display Alt Attributes
- Images > Hide Background Images
- Information > Display > Link Details
- Info > View Link Information
- Information > Topographic data display
- Outline > Outline Links > Outline External Links
The webpage you are currently seeing will be altered in ways you cannot imagine; after choosing some (or all) of the aforementioned options. Fortunately, the toolbar offers a useful “Reset Page” button that may be located under “Options”. When you click this button, the page will revert to its previous appearance.
Using Hidden Text and Links in an SEO-Friendly Way
While improving a website, not all concealed content is detrimental. Unknown features that function differently for users on mobile and desktop devices can occasionally be found on responsive websites.
Although a search engine will let other kinds of hidden material on a website; it still employs different algorithms to evaluate if the content on a web page is hidden or not. We’ve included a couple of SEO-friendly methods for hiding content below:
- Firstly, the page can be kept user-friendly by implementing hidden content inside navigational elements. The concealed material should therefore only be buried to enhance the website user experience and should be displayed via an icon, button, or link.
- Search engines will permit hidden content on websites that allow paid subscribers to access the content. With this tactic, the user will be able to watch a free sample of the website and get a sneak peek at what it will have to offer.
- A web page’s size will alter and be adjusted dynamically thanks to the website’s responsiveness feature.
- Some webmasters design their websites for the best experience for users across all web browsers, making ensuring that the page content will still render correctly even if the browser doesn’t allow images, JavaScript, flash files, or CSS.
Conclusion
Your only goal in hiding links or content should be to try to increase website ranking. Without going against search engine standards. It should not be related to manipulating search engine ranking algorithms. Although there is a lot of software that can analyze webpages for hidden text and links on the market.
