White fonting is the practice of inserting hidden keywords into the body of an electronic document, in order to influence the actions of a search program reviewing that document. The name white fonting comes from the practice of adding keywords to a webpage, using a white font on a white background, in an effort to hide the additional keywords from sight.
White fonting can be used as a
search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of Web traffic, website traffic to a website or a web page from web search engine, search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "Organ ...
(SEO) technique in webpages, by inserting the same keyword multiple times, to create a higher ranking in search engine results where
Keyword density
Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of search engine optimization, keyword density can be used to determine whether a web page is rel ...
is a factor. White fonting can also add unrelated, but often searched, keywords to a webpage in order to gain additional traffic.
White fonting is considered to be an unethical search engine optimization technique, because pages containing white fonting are not indexed and ranked on the basis of page content viewable by human readers. Sites perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, may be removed from search engine listings such as Google, and will not appear in search results pages.
White fonting can also be used to boost the visibility of other electronic documents evaluated by search engines or automated tracking software, such as resumes or reports.
See also
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Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique, considered webspam or spamdexing, in which keywords are loaded into a web page's meta tags, visible content, or backlink anchor text in an attempt to gain an unfair rank advantage ...
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Doorway pages Doorway pages (bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages or entry pages) are web pages that are created for the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes (spamdexing). A doorway page will affect the index of a search engine by ins ...
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Spamdexing
Spamdexing (also known as search engine spam, search engine poisoning, black-hat search engine optimization, search spam or web spam) is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as link building ...
References
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External links
Google Guidelines
Black hat search engine optimization