A previous article mentioned how Drupal is the choice of website professionals, being an opensource CMS (Content Management System). Unfortunately it is increasingly the choice of website amateurs; drupal has become easier for developers with minimal knowledge. Companies and individuals making website templates for sale on a 'template website' are mainly interested in its appearance and creating it in the fastest possible time. If the finished website is penalised by Google, the company that purchased the website template will be unaware that their keywords can never achieve page 1 of Google.
Appearance (Design) Can Incur Penalties
First Impressions Count - especially where a sale is involved. An attractive website design might involve the use of colour gradients, typically going from lighter to darker, with a contrasting text colour. A website using this technique was very light at the top of the 'blog' page and went the colour scheme became darker as the user scrolled down. The text was white, which had a nice 'contrasting effect' especially as the viewer read the blogs and moved down the page. Unfortunately the very top blog was the lightest part of the colour gradient and the 'comments' link was in white text, against a virtually white background; it could be identified by the Google algorithm as hidden text.
An algorithm is a simple mathematical tool that checks for various conditions, a text colour has a certain 'mathematical code' (e.g. the hexadecimal code for white is #FFFFFF) and this code can be compared against all the hexadecimal codes involved in the background. The worst case scenario is that the background has the same code as the text, an algorithm will flag this up as hidden text and it will be penalised.
Creating A Drupal Website In The Fastest Time
Creating Drupal Templates solely for sale on a template website gives the person assigned to make the template an incentive to cut corners and make it as fast as possible. Instructions to make the cursor respond to the 'mouse over button event' may be neglected, (possibly because the button is clearly labelled 'previous' or next'). The button itself may not respond to the 'mouse over', only the 'mouse click'. The button is a link, and on a poor website, the only way a user knows it is a link, is that it has the text (or an image) with the words 'previous' and next'. For a robot or algorithm, it could be seen as a hidden link, as neither the link, nor the cursor respond to 'mouse over'.
The Best Websites Can Incur Penalties
It should be mentioned that websites by professionals can also (inadvertently) incur penalties, for example Google barred BMW Germany from its index until it removed cloaking; the cloaking would have been unintentional.
Conclusion
It will not be obvious that your website is incurring a penalty, a typical website owner might think that they need to use various SEO techniques and link build; perhaps investing in 'Pay Per Click' and advertising. Their site may be incurring a penalty because they are 'keyword stuffing', or because a 'techy' person has done something that the search engine sees differently from the user, and is identified as cloaking. If after using various White Hat SEO methods (e.g. genuine articles ), your chosen keywords can be seen on page 1 of various search engines, typically Yahoo and Bing, but not Google, look carefully to see if you or the drupal developer has incurred any penalties.
The author (Dave Maratos) has written a Wiki SEO and numerous articles on Drupal Development, Drupal for Beginners and Drupal Phonegap.
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