Digital marketing term
Hidden Text
Copy shown to a crawler or scraper but hidden from a person on the page. Keyword cloaking is a spam risk; it is not the same as a screen-reader label.
Detailed explanation
The old trick is white-on-white type, off-screen blocks, zero-size fonts, or CSS that hides a keyword dump. The goal is rankings without making anyone read it. Modern systems treat that as a quality and cloaking signal; any bump is usually short.
“Just a little hiding” and keyword lists stuffed in the footer are still mistakes. Real accessible names (alt, aria) are legitimate; display:none around an extra article is not. Serving bots different HTML than users is cloaking.
Watch crawl flags, manual-action risk, and stuffed density. If a block exists only for bots, delete it and write the useful version in view. The rule is simple: give people and crawlers the same text.
Frequently asked questions
- Are screen-reader labels spam?
- No, if they name a real control. A keyword paragraph closed to users and open to bots is hidden text.
- How do you audit for it?
- Find copy in the source that never appears on the page, tiny low-contrast blocks, and long CSS-hidden passages. Remove anything suspicious.
Related terms
Internal links for the topic cluster — read these concepts together.
- SEOSEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the set of technical and content practices that help a website rank more visibly in organic search results.
- On-Page SEOThe ranking and click work you do in a page’s own code and copy: title, structure, internal links, speed, and intent match. A vote from another site is off-page, not this.
- CSSThe stylesheet language that sets color, type, space, and layout on an HTML page. It decides how the interface looks and how interactions feel in the browser.
- Keyword DensityHow often a target phrase appears relative to the rest of the page. There is no magic percentage that ranks you; stuffing reads as spam and can hurt visibility.
- Title TagThe primary HTML title for a page: browser tab, SERP headline, and a core on-page ranking cue. A vague or duplicated title wastes both clicks and the strongest keyword placement you have.
- ContentThe articles, videos, guides, and assets a brand publishes in search, email, social, or on-site. The job is to answer a question and earn the next step—not to fill a calendar.