In a desire to always improve the user experience, one could then think that Google gives more weight to the content that the user can see rather than to the hidden text. Only, there are no studies to confirm or refute this. Shai Aharony therefore decided to lead his own. The Hidden Text SEO Experience His experience consisted of comparing the SEO results of websites composed of content present in 4 different forms: Fully visible text A hidden text with an HTML TextArea tag Hidden text via CSS A hidden text via JavaScript To carry out this experiment, Shai Aharony had to invent a keyword that is not present on the Internet at all.
Thus, the experience was as neutral as possible. He therefore chose “andefabribiles”, the name given to a type of fictitious bacteria. Similar, but not duplicated, content fax list of around 400 words was written. Each content was integrated into a website created for the occasion. In total, 20 sites with completely blank domain names were created: 4 with fully visible text 4 in JavaScript with hidden text 4 in CSS with hidden text 4 with hidden text via a TextArea tag. Small clarification: the keyword was mentioned 3 times in each content and was not present in the first visible paragraph.
The results of the experiment After 6 months of experience, the results are clear. Google favors visible texts more in its ranking, but also TextAreas. CSS and JavaScript sites containing hidden texts are visibly lower ranked and their positions are very similar. On the other hand, the results on the other search engines, Bing and Yahoo! in this case, are not so explicit. Findings from the hidden text experiment Shai Aharony's experiment on hidden text highlights the superiority of Google's algorithm over its competitors, Yahoo! and Bing.