Hidden Text and Forms

[Merrows]

I read at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html (also commonly known) that hidden text should be "avoided" Does this apply to forms?

Most people know that hidden text is widely used in forms. It is even officially endorsed by many banks using forms for online transactions, eg Barclaycard.

My own site at redburg.co.uk appears way down in any listings and the PR is 0. I am using hidden text in the <input> but this is standard HTML and it used to convery data. The only other way is to pass everything via a ? which is more difficult.

[akbigdog]

I believe what you are referring to as "hidden text" in forms is actually just a hidden input field--<input type="hidden">.
This is a very common use of transferring data between pages, especially when submitting form data. My interpretation of the webmaster guildelines that you referenced was not this practice of hidden form fields at all.
Instead, I think Google was referring to text that is hidden from the user in some way, whose sole purpose is to be seen by a crawler or bot. An example of this might be including hundreds of keywords far below the actual content of your page or perhaps creating text the same color as the background of a document.
In any case, you need not worry about sacrificing ranking due to hidden form fields.

[seo guy]

The standard form output is not hidden text and you are fine. However, you have 623 reported links and a PR 0 this is something to worry about http://www.google.com/search?q=link:http://www.redburg.co.uk/&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2coff=1&filter=0 unless of course your site is brand new, in which case it may not have seen its first PR update yet.

[rizla]

interesting. [COLOR=Orange][SIZE=3]seo-pros [/SIZE] [/COLOR] - what is your opinion about it?

moreover - I need your response for something related to hidden links:
3 months ago I planted links from this kind:

<a href="http://www.my - seo - lab - test - site. net" style="display:none;">my text KW</a>

I was very sceptic about biG reaction to this [COLOR=Blue]display:none[/COLOR] links but was surprised to notice that the pages were crawled and indexed.
am I missing something here? is this a legit way to accumulate BL's?

thanks

[akbigdog]

I've used that method a lots of times, and it seems to work great. I guess the bots aren't too good yet at reading CSS styles and determining the value of a link based on its appearance as set by CSS.
I have, however, gone about the approach slightly differently. I have three sites that all link to each other--a 5, 6, and an 8. On each, I link to the other two by placing two links in a < div > with style="display:none;". Then you can place normal < a > tags inside without applying the style to each one. Also, for browsers that may not support the "display" CSS attribute, you could use something more common--font-size:0;.