In the legends of SEO, there is a legend of the pixel. The main idea is that, you can put 10,000 words in a single pixel.
Google will rank the page based on the content in the pixel, and the human visitor sees an optimized landing page.
The human visitor does not know that all that content is on the page because it’s hidden inside the space of a pixel and the human visitor never sees it. We test to see if we could index a page with keywords hidden in pixels.
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This is an old school SEO legend. The idea is you can put 10,000 words inside a pixel on your page and that Google will read all that text in that pixel and rank your page because of that pixel but the user don’t see any of that text. They see a well optimized, convertible page, is the concept.
I have been in SEO, earnestly, full time, for 6 years and I was doing part time a little bit before then.
Let’s say I have been in the game for 8 years and this was a legend that I have heard almost out of the gate. This was a thing that you can do back in 2001 or something like that. You can stuff everything inside a pixel and it was the ranking thing but then of course, it was cloaking, obviously and it goes against the terms of service and it is bad but also, it doesn’t work anymore. But I was really inspired with this, with the stuff that Clint was talking about at SEO Rockstars and he has talked about this before, we have talked about this before that what is old is new.
The idea that old school stuff that was working before maybe has died and has resurrected itself. That is where the background of this is. So there is one other thing. When I got started with this, I had no idea how to put 10,000 words into a pixel. Fortunately, I have a nerd brother and I have nerd friends and Ted Kubaitis is one of them.
There are two different styles.
Style number one and this came from my brother, was essentially to put a div style where the height is one pixel and the width is one pixel and then the overflow is hidden. Meaning, if something was to overflow outside that pixel, it would still be covered. This doesn’t create anything on the page. It completely hides anything.
The second method which came from Ted is scaling. Essentially, you take text and scale it down to one pixel. Method one is putting everything into a pixel and hiding it if it is going to burst out and overflow like a volcano, you hide that. This method is to take the content and scale it down so that it is one pixel. We made it red so you can see it.
Both worked. They both indexed. This was exciting and a lot of fun. Obviously, these things violate Google’s Terms of Service. This is cloaking. This is the oldest form of cloaking. Ted being a purist would tell you that his method is more correct than the first one.
Dori: Wouldn’t that be considered keyboard stuffing. That is how people keyword stuffed way back in the day.
I think they would call it cloaking because you are showing one thing to the Google bot and something else to the visitor. But, either way, they are not going to be happy about it. The only way that they would actually find this is by a manual review but what if you didn’t do 10,000 words. What if you only did 50 words, or 10 words?
If this is something that interests you, this works. This was, in my mind, like an old school seo legend, I feel like day 4, when I started doing SEO, the legend of the pixel, it totally works and that is two different methods that you can do if this is something that intrigues you.
I was actually kind of thinking about this in a PBN thing. What if you put your links in a pixel? Just put your links in a pixel and you can have a site that looks totally not spammy and might be a real site. You just have links in pixels.
What we are playing with right now is trying to see if we can put a link in there and get that to pass juice.