Keyword Shenanigans Could Get Hutchison's New Website Banned From Search Results

UPDATE: By 2:30 pm Friday, the hidden text was removed from the Hutchison site. The Statesman captured the words and phrases that were there Thursday afternoon. The site has not yet returned to Google's index to be part of any search results. With this incident and the recent mass e-mail glitch from House candidate Lainey Melnick's site, it's been a rough season for builders of political websites.

UPDATE: The site has indeed been removed from Google's search results. As Matt Cutts, the head of Google's webspam team, explained via Twitter: "Hidden text is a violation of our quality guidelines. We've removed the site from our index, and tried to contact the site maintainers by email to explain that the hidden text was the cause for the site's removal from index." The site doesn't appear in the results for a search for "standbykay" at the Bing or Yahoo search sites, either. Removal of the hidden text would allow the site to appear in search results again.

The Statesman reported this morning that Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's new website for her gubernatorial campaign contained a list of more than 2,000 hidden keywords, including "rick perry gay".

Campaign spokesman Jeff Sadosky said later that the "gay" statements would be removed, but indicated the rest would remain. Current phrases include "the african american in texas" and "death of frank madla". (You can see the list by going to the site and then selecting "View Source" from your browser's menu.)

That might not be enough to get Hutchison out of the woods on the Web, however. Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land and one of the leading authorities in the field of search-engine optimization, said that no matter the purpose of the hidden text, the practice went against standard webpage building procedure.

"My opinion is that regardless of the exact word, the campaign web site is in violation of the major search engine guidelines that prohibit the use of hidden text as she’s doing," Sullivan said.

The technique of loading up a page with hidden words and phrases is no longer an accepted or effective way of driving web traffic, and could even have the opposite effect.

"Sounds like someone fairly unsophisticated about SEO decided that shoving all these words into the page was a good thing. It’s a technique, however, that could get the site banned on Google and other search engines," Sullivan said.