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I believe Google is moving towards graphical understanding of the text as well and it should be able to render the pages and see what is going on the page... those days will soon be over and technical excellency in SEO will talk.

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What if you use custom blank fonts? Or simply detect the User Agent and serve a different CSS file?

Or detect the user agent and simply serve different content? I'm pretty sure that Google penalties this though.

Yep. Here you go: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355

Here's the full "Don't do this sh!t" article from Google: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769#quality_g...

I think its known Google can masquerade as a "normal" visitor if it suspects you of cloaking (non identifying UA string and coming from a non disclosed google crawl IP)

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en

I think they also use this to notify you in webmastertools when/if your site is hacked and is doing it to avoid detection by the normal user.

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