Trulia.com Uses Hidden Text
Ever wonder why Trulia.com can out rank so many rental sites even though Trulia has nothing to do with rentals?
In fact if you look at the this Trulia page for Prescott you will notice the word rent is not even on the page, even though they rank #3 for the phrase “Prescott houses for rent” in Google.
If you look closely at their code you can see the word “rent” is actually being used on the page but it is hidden from view using a hidden <div> tag.
Are they doing this on purpose? No, I don’t think so, they are trying to give the user a nice experience by not messing up the page. Google looks at intent - and I don’t think they are intentionally doing this to get people looking for rentals on their site but I am sure they get a ton of traffic because of it.
Since Trulia has so much trust and pages linking to it, all they have to do is insert one hidden word on the page and it can out rank rental sites like mine. I am not being a cry baby here, since I know I can out rank them in Prescott if I wanted to, I am just trying to get the conversation going about hidden div’s.
I would love to use hidden div’s like this to improve my user’s experience but I am too scared I would get kicked out of the index, but Truila doesn’t need to worry since they are a large company and probably have a person at Google they can call if they get hurt in the rankings.
If someone at Google (Matt Cutts / Brian White) is reading this, I think you should create a tweak so this doesn’t happen.
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