Manual action recovery

Hidden Text and Keyword Stuffing - Manual Action Recovery

Google has found text on your pages that search engines can read and visitors can't, or pages loaded with repeated keywords, so we find every instance, fix it at source and get the manual action lifted.

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Hidden text and keyword stuffing illustration

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Google’s Manual Actions report ↗

Search Console / Report example

Manual actions

Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing

WHAT IS A HIDDEN TEXT AND KEYWORD STUFFING MANUAL ACTION?

This manual action covers two old-school techniques that often turn up together, the first being hidden text, i.e. content placed on a page for search engines that a human visitor can't see, and the second being keyword stuffing, where a page is filled with keywords or lists of words in an unnatural way to try and rank for them. Both are against Google's spam policies and both tend to live in templates, footers and old pages that nobody has looked at for years.

WHAT DOES IT DO TO YOUR SITE?

The pages or sections where the reviewer found the problem are demoted or removed from the results, and because hidden text is very often in a shared template such as a footer or a sidebar, an issue that sits in one file can end up affecting every page on the site.

Scope: Affected pages and templates
Typical clean-up time: Estimated after diagnosis
Review time: Several days or weeks

WHY DID GOOGLE ISSUE IT?

There is text on your pages in the same colour as the background, or in a font size of zero, which you can often reveal by selecting everything on the page

Content has been positioned off-screen or hidden with CSS so that it's in the HTML for crawlers and never displayed to a visitor

Blocks of towns, postcodes or keyword variations have been added to the bottom of pages with no context around them

Title tags, alt text and headings contain strings of repeated keywords that don't read as a sentence

A theme, a plugin or a previous SEO added "SEO text" in a collapsed or hidden element that you didn't know was there

HOW DO WE FIX IT?

We crawl the site and compare the raw and rendered HTML with what is visibly displayed, which flags any text a crawler can read and a visitor can't
Rendered-page comparison
Evidence log · Hidden text and keyword stuffing
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We inspect the CSS and the templates for the usual hiding methods, i.e. matching colours, zero font sizes, off-screen positioning, hidden overflow and so on
Affected template inventory
Evidence log · Hidden text and keyword stuffing
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We review titles, headings, alt text and body copy across the site for keyword repetition and lists of terms with no context
Visible copy changes
Evidence log · Hidden text and keyword stuffing
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We remove the hidden text or restyle it so it's equally visible to users and crawlers, and rewrite the stuffed content so that it reads naturally
Template retest
Evidence log · Hidden text and keyword stuffing
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We write and submit the reconsideration request with before and after examples
Submission record
Evidence log · Hidden text and keyword stuffing
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date

WHAT GOES INTO THE RECONSIDERATION REQUEST?

The request lists where the hidden text and stuffed content was found, which templates and how many pages were affected, what was changed and a set of URLs the reviewer can check, and where the cause was a theme or a plugin we name it and confirm that it has been removed or updated.

Reconsideration request service →

Questions about recovery

Are accordions and tabs counted as hidden text?

No, content that a visitor can reveal by clicking a tab or an accordion is a normal design pattern, the manual action is aimed at text that is there for search engines and can't be seen by a person at all.

How do I know if my content is keyword stuffed?

If a sentence wouldn't sound right read out loud because the same phrase keeps appearing, or there's a list of locations or terms sat on the page with nothing around it, then a reviewer is likely to see it as stuffing.

How long does recovery take?

Your diagnostic will include a clean-up estimate, and Google’s review usually takes several days or weeks, with link reviews sometimes taking longer.

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