I am building a site for a client based on a design that his graphic designer gave him. This design shows the H1 headings as only 1 or 2 words (the title of product). However, when I run Website Auditor against this site, it tells me to use many more words than this in my H1 headings, sometimes as many as 30 or 40 - depending on the competition.

The client is insistent that I can't alter the design to add more words to the headings but this problem got me thinking in an effort to find a way around this.

The solution I came up with was to create a H1 with the product name as the first 2 words but then add all the required keywords immediately after. I then wrapped these additional words in <span></span> tags and changed their colour to the same as the page background (white) and reduced their size to 1px. The result is that the product name displays as per the design but immediately after are all the additional words required for SEO but as they are white and only 1px, they can't be seen by the user. But they are there in the code and their presence gives a great WA score (almost 100%).

My question is...

By manipulating the H1 in this manner, is it ok? I mean it won't attract some sort of Google penalty will it? I can't see why it would but I don't want to do something on a client site that might get them banned or is somehow "black hat" in nature - even if by accident.

I'd be really interested to hear people's thoughts on this work-around (I think it's clever) as it would solve a problem I come up against a lot trying to attain a high score in WA.

Well, this sounds like hundred percent black hat - basically presenting some content to the search engine while not showing it to the visitors. You are risking a penalty, yes.



Could you please PM me the site in question? I'd like to take a look, maybe something can be done without hiding the words.

But I'm not really "hiding" the content. I mean they are right there on the page. In fact the additional words are all wrapped inside the same H1 tag. It's just that because they are white and only 1px in size, you can't see them - but they aren't actually hidden. If you mouse over the area where they are and drag>select, you can see them.



I'm working locally at the moment so there is no public facing site yet. I'm uploading the work to a staging site soon for the client to review (maybe tomorrow) so I can send you a link then.

In order for Google to penalize the site, it would have to know that the content wasn't visible to the user. How would G know this? You would only be able to know this if you actually looked at the page and then compared it with the content in the source. I'm curious, how would Google know to penalize me??

Thanks for taking the time to reply...