Major SEO issue?

No I don't think so.

Here is a test for a Signwriter website we developed, check out these Google page results, http://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Awww.pepespaperie.com.au+corban

You can see where the Signwriter text is actually listed in the result summary correctly.

Google seems to like to avoid answering the question as to whether or not having a legitimate hidden text duplicate of text that is in an image will be penalized. I'm under the impression that you wouldn't be excluded without further investigation but I wouldn't exclude the possibility that your rank could be reduced as a result of the crawl finding this hidden text.

If the

<span style='display: none'>Signwriter</span>

part is removed you also have the issue that the text in your image gets missed by Google.

Do you have any ideas for a solution?

But the question is: does construction

have the same value for search spider as

text

...? If answer is yes, then we don't need this span at all.

Yes I think it does, which is why I provided this example http://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Awww.pepespaperie.com.au+corban

That site uses an older version of Signwriter which does not have the span tag feature.

Here is an example page http://pepespaperie.com.au/about-us and the relevant HTML extract code below for your reference.

<div id='heading'>

      <div id='headertext'>
      <span style='display: none'>about us</span><img src='/signwriter-cache/b28a1ac86fda15e66ed5f5622964f209.gif' alt='about us' />      </div>
      <h1>about us</h1>
      <form action="/search/node"  method="post" id="search-theme-form">
<div><div id='search' class='container-inline'><label for='edit-search_theme_form_keys'>search</label><div class="form-item">
 <input type="text" maxlength="128" name="search_theme_form_keys" id="edit-search-theme-form-keys"  size="15" value="" title="Enter the terms you wish to search for." class="form-text" />
</div>

And to locate this page in Google search results, http://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Apepespaperie.com.au+about+us

Proof.

I am yet to see an reliable proof that display: none or overflow: hidden or any other such technique (e.g. negative margins to hide entire divs) is penalised by any search engine.

I my experience SE's care more about content - if you understand this fully you'll quickly realise the futility of trying to spam SE's by hiding blocks of text.

In any regard the usage of these techniques is so ubiquitous SE's would find it far to difficult to differentiate between black-hats and white.

Personally I use it all the time, and have read numereuous posts and discussions about this on Highrankings and other respected SEO sites and everyone agree's, its just not an issue right now.

Sorry to post in a closed thread, I kind of stumbled on this.

Hi,

I'm sorry to re-open this issue but I have to ask. When following google guidelines I view my pages in a lynx viewer. ( http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php ) and for every page that I have the signwriter profile showing up on the text actually shows up 2 times in a row. For example, if the page title is "Drupal site" then the output to the lynx view would be "Drupal site Drupal site". So, not only does my title tag have these words but then the words are repeated 2x at the very beginning of the content. I have to say that if I were a bot that I would consider this spam. I love this module, there has got to be a way around this.

From Google:

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would.

We could add an option on the signwriter profiles that allows you to toggle on/off the display none span.

Hi,
Thanks. Perhaps that would do the trick. I'll stay tuned to see any patches or new release.

Thanks again!

When the new 6.x-1.0-dev version comes up today there will be a new option to disable the hidden span for each profile.

It's great that you've addressed this, unfortunately I'm using the 5.x-1.5 version.

Yeah, there are a few things now that are only available in the 6 version.

As soon as I get a chance I'll update the 5 version so it is in line with the 6 one.

Looking forward to it, Thanks!

Re-assigning to D5 so we don't forget to action this one.

Any update on this? Thanks.

Just a little tickle for ya!

This has been fixed in 5.x-1.x-dev