My previous post was on the topic of Easter Eggs…
Easter eggs are normally created by wannabe-creative programmers with too much time on their hands. They place random hidden items – like text, images, and even pages – for people to find by accident.
In some cases hidden messages have been placed in books, Movies, Games, and even bonus materials on CD’s or DVD’s. The message is out there; you just gotta read the signs…
Google has a few - Check the video below for some examples of Easter Eggs:
So not wanting to be outdone, I’ve decided to do something as well. Keep watching this space…
Muti
Comments
Don - not exactly a Easter Egg. That looks more like hidden text with the aim to gain better rankings on Search Engines.
The difference is that hidden text easter eggs are normally short, something funny, and totally irrelevant to the website.
It's normally not a good idea to make use of hidden text on pages that are spiderable, so if you are looking to add a few to your own site - keep this in mind.
What happens if the search engine sees hidden text, such as that on http://www.justin-time.co.za website. Does it ban the entire site or just that page?
I believe that how search engines penalize the site/page will differ, but Google definitely treats keyword stuffing and hidden text quite severely. Site banning would probably be imminent.
flip da woo, flick flack fo!
There is no way to pick up something like the hidden text on justin-time , except with the naked eye, because it blends in with a background image.
Thats what i thought was the purpose of an Easter Egg. So if Google does not pick this up then how do they penalise you?
Google's spider doesn't see the page as humans do, it reads the source code of the page in plain text. Thus the text is not hidden to the spider.
View the page source and you will see what the spider sees.
OK here's two pages from Google that should explain this all:
Keyword stuffing:
www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66358
Hidden text and links:
www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353
re: www.justin-time.co.za
and he does it very badly :)
I see some of the pages from this site have penalised in Google. Dodgy SEO, so dodgy.
Hi Don, to which site are you referring to?
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Would the text right at the bottom of the www.justin-time.co.za homepage be considered to be an easter egg.
Posted by Don on 2007/09/20