Hiding Stuff from the Search Engines

Hi Jill,

First, let me say how much I enjoy reading High Rankings' Advisor. Even an old boat mechanic like me can pick up a tip or two, although I'm generally scared to try anything different. Any rankings I have must be through your preached "content is everything" method. :-)

What I was wondering about are two hidden (I guess) areas of a webpage.

#1- On my sitemap, I make use of some tool tips so that when a visitor hovers over a link it gives some idea what's on the page. Most of the time they contain a description and text that may not be anywhere else on my site...but may contain "more good content."

Do the spiders see the pop up tool tip text on their journey through my site?

#2- I have a redirect page that I send new subscribers to after they sign up for my newsletter. This redirect contains links to a couple of older newsletters. I'm thinking of adding links there to all my past newsletters. This "thank you" page is normally only viewed after submitting the form for subscriptions.

Do the spiders see this page and then spider the newsletter links, or have I somehow hidden a few pages on my site?

I don't make a living with this website, so I guess it's no big deal, but for the life of me I can't find the answer!

Thanks sincerely for a great newsletter.

Wayne Weber
Broke Boats.com

++Jill's Response++

Hi Wayne,

Glad you enjoy the newsletter! My goal is to always make it understandable to the average Web site owner, and it's nice to know that I'm on the right track.

As to the "hidden" information within the links on your sitemap page, it doesn't appear as if Google can index that information. To test this, I did a search using the exact wording from one of your hidden text areas, plus your domain. For example, you have the phrase "Safety equipment is the Law" in one of your mouseovers. So I put "Safety equipment is the Law" + "brokeboats+com" in the Google search box, and no results showed up. I tried it with a few other phrases also, and none of them panned out. (If you search for the phrases without the quotes, you can see where some of those words are showing up on other pages of your site, but not on the sitemap page.)

Now, this doesn't mean that Google isn't taking note of those words and perhaps counting them as being relevant to your site, but only Google knows that for sure. What I would do, instead of using those fancy mouseovers, is put a visible description under each hyperlink. These words could be keyword-rich, and they'd definitely get indexed. Plus, it would be helpful to your visitors who may be using older browsers and can't view your mouseovers.

In answer to your second question, if the links to the pages you're asking about are on the "thank you" page and nowhere else, then the search engine spiders won't be able to find those pages. The search engines don't sign up for your newsletter, and therefore can't get to your "thank you" page. If you want the old newsletters to be indexed, you should definitely put links to them on your sitemap page.

Hope this helps!

Jill
July 11, 2002