Finding Hidden Spam Text and Links on a Webpage

If you want your website to do well in search engine results, you are going to have to make sure that your website is free of any spam. Now, you may wonder how you would possibly like to put spam on your website. If your website allows other users to enter content, you are always at the risk of having spam content on your website.

One of the most dangerous types of spam is the hidden text or links on your website. These hidden text or links are usually placed by malicious computer codes or users. There are different ways you can get spam on your website. Some of those ways include:

• Your website accepts guest posts.
• You are not filtering the comment section of your website.
• Your website is hacked and hackers are using content injection techniques to enter their content.
• You have copied CSS styling from other website to your webpage.

Here, it would be worth mentioning the factors which Google considers the violation of rules. Those factors include:

• Same text color of the background color of the page
• Text or links are that hidden using CSS techniques. Such text and links are not visible to the users but they are visible to search engines.

You have to keep in mind here that not all of the hidden text and links are considered deceptive or violation of rules.

Now, we are going to discuss some ways you can counter hidden spam on your webpages.

‘Web Developer’ Add-on

After installing this add-on, a grey icon will appear on the upper right corner of your browser. There are going to appear many options when you will click on this icon. In order to see what’s hidden in your webpage, you can simply disable all of the CSS.

Using this add-on, you are going to have option to disable in the inline styles. Inline styles are usually available to users. They use this style to hide the content they enter into your website. Content editor like TinyMCE provide them the option to apply inline style.

If the use of above option is not giving you the results, you can disable all of the CSS of the website. This way, any of the hidden content will not be skipped from being displayed on the screen. However, you will need to have adequate developmental knowhow to deal with the spam in this regard.

‘Link Grabber’ add-on

The use of this add-on is pretty simple. It will just produce a report of all of the links in the webpage. This way, you will be able to spot any unusual linking on your website.