Truth be told, this is one of my favorite examples of hidden text, because it shows that people don't always use spam techniques for making money.
I haven't had much luck contacting the maintainer of that page to ask them to remove the hidden text.
>I'm the head of the webspam team at Google.
Once a few clever souls realised they could increase their visibility by adding hidden words, they started appearing everywhere almost completely ruining any chance you had of finding something you want or need by searching due to all the false positives.
I know this arms race is still ongoing, but it's interesting to see back where we've been.
- that's just an insane thing to suggest, that would exclude much of the world's poetry, lyrics (I'm looking at you Icona Pop), code, etc etc etc. What does it even mean "to parse" in this context.
"it's trivial to deduce that the text doesn't display" - for that example it might be, but in general it's anything but trivial.
In a similar vein, "invisible to user" text may get cross referenced with "visible to bot" text and if there's a discrepancy, that may count against your rank.
Edit: The website is responsive, clearly got there priorities sorted.
History lesson: Fluid widths were quite common until around 2005, as there weren't a large number of resolutions to cater to. Around the start of 2006 designers started switching to 800-960px to have the webpages look the same or nearly the same on every page.
[0] http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp - In early 2006 77% of displays were between 800-1024px wide.