Hidden text is essentially text that is not visible to human visitors. However, this text can be detected by crawlers that scan your site.

So, can I use hidden text to rank higher on search engines results pages (SERPs)?

Although it may be true that putting keywords as hidden text can boost your rankings, search engines nowadays are more sophisticated and able to pick up on these tricks. If crawlers scan the keywords and see that they are unnoticeable, they could get your website penalized.

Using hidden keywords to increase a site’s keyword density is also frowned upon and can be considered spamming.

When can I use hidden text?

While hidden text can impact your website negatively, there are some valid reasons to use it.

• When you offer a paid subscription for part of your site’s content.

• To improve navigation and user experience.

• To improve a site’s responsiveness.

Sometimes, SEO experts also use the hidden text command to hide links. Having too many of them on the screen can be overwhelming to the user. So, things like drop-down menus, accordion navigation, slider menus, etc., could be made invisible to the site when browsed from a mobile device, for example. This improves user experience and prevents readers from getting annoyed or frustrated.

The features mentioned above could also affect the responsiveness of your website. Responsive sites are the ones who change and adjust to the dimensions of the device used to browse them. The dimensions of a website on a laptop are different than on smartphones. For your pages to be responsive, you must assign a width on the HTML or CSS source code. If you open a webpage and that width limit has been reached, then certain items may appear hidden from your screen.