Is this considered Black Hat?

[rachaelpracht]

So here is the website I’m looking at, it ranks #1 in keywords like used cars for sale billings mt, etc. I was trying to figure out how, because there is no content on the page! I am working on one of our sites to get it to rank better when I found this in my research.

#1 http://prntscr.com/aoy0ho

So I did a “view page source” to see how many times they’re using keywords and what they’re title and description tags are.

#2 http://prntscr.com/aoy0w1

WAIT WHAT…. WHERE IS THIS CONTENT?!

#3 http://prntscr.com/aoy13o

Then I found it…

#4 http://prntscr.com/aoy1e8

#5 http://prntscr.com/aoy1o8

#6 http://prntscr.com/aoy1u1

It doesn’t even read like real content. This has to be considered poor form. I'm not sure why it makes me so angry. What do you guys think?

[GlobeRunner]

Generally I wouldn't consider that "black hat", although it is hiding the content on the page--which is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. They've mentioned before that if you have content that is "hidden" like this to most users, the expanded content should be displayed in the expanded mode, not in the way it's being done here.

This generally doesn't quality as being "black hat", though.

[rachaelpracht]

It definitely seems shady. I wasn't sure if this was considered "hiding" or "cloaking" because you can easily find the text when you view the source (and I assume that looks more like what the search engines are viewing ) but you have to click several times and you have to know where to look to find it.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66353?hl=en

This is the article I found to correspond with it.

Thanks for your feedback!

[RobertFisher]

The fact they are hiding content IMO this is black hat. But, don't get too caught up in it being black hat. I know your site and in most searches you are ahead of them. They have 4 backlinks all no followed. I think there are things you could do on other pages on your site to push them down and end up with more than one page on the SERP.

Go get em!