Access Matters

Hidden text can be a spammer’s haven.

Years ago, when screen readers were at release 4.0, they started to change and actually pay attention to display:none. I ran a series of tests back then and knew exactly how every screen reader behaved. I was one of the earliest advocates of hiding helpful text off to the left of the visible viewport. I’ve used it cautiously for things like skip links, for the real text associated with image replacement headers, and for occassional other situations where the blind could benefit from having text available that wasn’t part of the visual design.

Along the way, people speculated whether search engine owners would eventually scoff at the technique. It is too similar to the nefarious methods of “link stuffing” that many spammers practice. I ignored the issue … until yesterday when I received the following from Google:

Dear site owner or webmaster of access-matters.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from access-matters.com are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages:

* The following hidden text on access-matters.com:

e.g.

cation approval card credit instant Low apr interest credit cards Juniper credit card application. Lowest phentermine prices Credit score Apply for a fleet low interest credit card application Zithromax no prescription Zoloft interactions Credit credit card applications? Hoodia information Propecia effectiveness, Reporting and interpreting liabilities Credit scores explained! Zocor lipitor Side effects from fosamax medicati

[...]

Ah gee, has it gotten so bad that they have to crack down on my very simple use of “off left?” Didn’t they look to see that the class is “access,” making it clear that it’s done for accessibility? So, it was off to their guidelines documents, and to their forums. The guidelines were not specific enough to answer my questions. The forums had lots of discussion, but most was speculation by curious people like me … and no answers from anyone with Google credentials. The best information I found was an interview with Google’s Matt Cutts at the StoneTemple Consulting site. In that interview, Matt said:

So, our philosophy has tried to be not to find any false positives, but to try to detect stuff that would qualify as keyword stuffing, or gibberish, or stitching pages, or scraping, especially put together with hidden text.

We use a combination of algorithmic and manual things to find hidden text.

There was little to lead me to believe they had cracked down hard. Yet, I was skeptical that they might no longer be doing the “manual things” and making due consideration. So, lets’ have a look…

I pulled up the site and disabled CSS using Chris Pederick’s excellent Web-Developer toolbar. ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHH! Just below the header area was a huge block of spam links. What the ??? Where the H___ did they come from?

Long story short, the site had been hacked. The hacker left behind one line of code in the header.php file. That line started with <font style=’position: absolute;overflow: hidden;height: 0;width: 0′> and contained about 150 links for various pharmaceutical products, doubtful financial products, and enhancement products of all types for all genders. Yes, the hosting service confirmed the password thefts. Yes, I cleaned it up and changed my passwords.

Yes, Google was right. Spam was stuffed into hidden text on my site.

They were not complaining about my accessibility technique.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Quizzes. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.