How To Get Filtered Out Of Google
Apparantly, using "display: block" will do it. BCF (www.bankcardfinder.com) was already not ranking in Google for other reasons, but during my recent redesign I recreated the site using CSS only. No tables (almost). Part of the process to do that involved using "display: block" on link tags with the intent being that the entire area around the link tag is clickable, not just the text. And then last month or so, Googlebot completely stops crawling BCF. The only pages it still has indexed are very old ones that don't exist anymore.
It seems that, in the past, Black SEO's have used "display: block" to hide links in some manner. My understanding of the technique is that if you use "display: block" without defining height or other properties, your .css file trips a filter:
#sidenav a {display: block}
In Google's eyes, that's the equivalent of using "display: none" or "display: hidden". So, the White Hat SEO folks at Bruce Clay (www.bruceclay.com) who brought it to my attention have suggested I remove that from BCF's styles.css file, as well as changing the technique of using negative pixels to adjust background images on rollover (all that was intended there was to give list items a different rollover state). Nothing on BCF uses hidden text or links or anything else (I made sure of that), but certain types of CSS code have been so muddied up by Black Hat SEO's that you just have to avoid them entirely nowadays, or else you'll look like a hider.
I wasn't trying to wear any hat except for my old backwards brown baseball cap, (*frowns*). Looks like I'm going to have to avoid even more CSS techniques because Google dislikes us Brown Hats, :(