One thing is for sure, you don't want to spend hours, perhaps days, months, or years on a website to have some stupid little mistake get your site dropped or never even listed in the search engines. There are a lot of rules that search engines have created to block out what they call spammers, so don't kid yourself by telling yourself you are not an evil spammer. As the courts might say, ignorance of the law is no excuse. So what kind of horrific mistake could sneak upon you and possibly ruin all your hard work? When I first starting making web pages, I created basic templates that I used for an entire site. Of course it's great to have a uniformed look for your site, but what if you had a screw up on a template you used over and over again. What kind of screw up?

How about hidden text or a hidden link? You see the old WYSIWIG editors, like the older versions of FrontPage sometimes leave behind links within the html code even after you've deleted the link. As far as hidden text, that can happen by not paying attention to what you are doing. If you make hundreds of pages eventually you might accidentally color some of your text the same as your background. You say it's not likely. I wouldn't think so either, but it's happened to me several times. If you use the mistake ridden template over and over again, you might have a problem. It's generally understood that search engines frown on hidden text and links. How many will they overlook is anybody's guess. So if you haven't checked your old web pages, it might be profitable to check out your html code. Look for urls with no link text in the code. You can usually find hidden text by simply highlighting your webpage in your browser.