Blogger Toolbar is back from the hidden div.

You may have noticed that the Blogger toolbar has re-appeared at the top of this blog. (I'm actually sure you haven't noticed, as the only person who views this blog more than once in a lifetime is me, I'm pretty sure:)
Anyway, when I first created this site, I found a way of removing the toolbar at the top. In the template code, simply define the vertical position of the element to -500px, and it's not there anymore. This is all well and good, and I thought it was a cool way to be a bit original, even if it was a bit naughty. I did actually have a scan of Blogger's terms of service and I couldn't find removing the blogger toolbar anywhere, as I try to do the right thing by people. (Yeah, even big corporations. What goes around comes around, I always say.)
I was just thinking about putting the nav bar back, as a user suggested that it is annoying when browsing blogs through Blogger, as you have no "next" button to click on. This didn't occur to me, so in the interests of a better user experience, I have put it back.
The interesting thing I noticed as I was modifying the code, was the method of hiding the element. It is essentially a hidden div. That is, a <div> tag moved off the page to hide it's contents.
This technique is widely used by unscrupulous webmasters as a way to stuff a page with a lot of hidden keywords for the purpose of manipulating their search engine rankings. The user never sees the hidden text, but the search engines (before they got smarter) used to be unable to differentiate between hidden and visible text when it was done in certian ways.
Some methods do still seem to work, (ovbiously not hidden divs) but they are doomed to failure as the search engines become ever more efficient at detecting the various methods of hiding content.
If you do a search for this site in Google, you will find that it has a URL only listing for the home page, and no listings for any other pages on the site. As you can see from the counter, it does pull a *bit* of traffic, but mainly from Yahoo, MSN, and Blogger it's self. Actually I think the entire stats thingy is public so you can check out the referrers yourself if you want. It just occured to me that the hidden toolbar could have been a possible reason for this, so we will see if the listings improve in the next few months. It's interesting that we still seem to have Pagerank.
This site has not had hours of development put into it like a proper commercial project, and I'm not vigorously seeking links or adding content, so it's easy for these kind of oversights to creep in. Unfortunately, there would be a lot of "innocent" sites with unique and useful content (not necessarily like this one, I mean hobby sites etc.) that would not be getting many visitors becuase of little coding errors. I know the average "do it yourself" webmaster who does a Frontpage site of his stamp collection would know what a hidden div is, let alone how to find one. Even colouring some text the same colour as the background in Dreamweaver accidently will have this effect. I guess this is one of many challenges for the search engines, and one of the reasons that I have a job as a professional web developer.