Most good search engine optimization (SEO) professionals will say that loading sites with keywords or using hidden text to try to increase traffic is a big no-no, but apparently no one told that to the people running the new website for Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s gubernatorial campaign.
This week the Austin American-Statesman reported that the website for Hutchinson included more than 2,200 hidden phrases which resulted in the site being banned from Google search results. In replying to a tweet from Austinist.com’s Jeff Beckham, Google’s Matt Cutts said that the text violated the company’s guidelines and had been removed from the Google index.
"We’ve removed the site from our index, and tried to contact the site maintainers by email to explain that the hidden text was the cause for the site’s removal from index," Cutts said via Twitter yesterday.
Included in the list of phrases were two "gay" references to current Texas governor Rick Perry, which the Hutchinson campaign said would be removed. As of Friday, the terms no longer seemed to appear in the site’s source code.
Even by removing the questionable gay references, search engine optimization (SEO) expert Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land told Austinist that the use of so many keywords was a bad plan.
"Sounds like someone fairly unsophisticated about SEO decided that shoving all these words into the page was a good thing," Sullivan told the site.
