Bespoke Website With Lack of Front Page Content

[geniusenergyltd]

Hey guys,

I wanted to ask you your opinion..

If you had a website - portfolio style for argument's sake and it was based on wordpress, obviously the front page won't be SEO friendly if you want to keep the minimalistic approach - there will be hardly any content to tell google what to rank your site for...

So my question is, can you use a plugin that Google can 'see' content - such as a long unique article - that the user can't see in order to help you rank? I.e. for Gbot, the plugin would load the content plugin as plain html, but 'hide' it from most people visiting the site...

What would you do in this scenario?

Your response would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance for your help!

[EcommerceSite]

I would not recommend putting anything on your site that Google can see but not your customers. From- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66353?hl=en

Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

• Using white text on a white background
• Locating text behind an image
• Using CSS to position text off-screen
• Setting the font size to 0
• Hiding a link by only linking one small character—for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph

[TomRayner]

Hi there

You can certainly make use of some design elements to help your website appear attractive, but so it still contains useful information for both your user and the search bots.

You might have seen this already with landing pages that contain a video.  You might want to make the video the main focus of the page with little other content visible to direct attention to the video and subsequent call to action (CTA). However, what people have done in the past, with good success, is include the transcript in expandable content.  There will be a bit of text saying "Click here for the transcript" and, upon clicking that text, an element will fire, a box will expand down and the content of the video is then displayed.  The search bot can read the content at all times, which will help the page to rank (provided it is on-topic), while the text is hidden by default for user experience reasons.  There are lots of variations of this that you might have already seen.

There are two things that I would always consider: 1) Make sure you are hiding the content purely for design/UX reasons and not nefarious reasons (such as hiding text on an irrelevant page/website) and 2) Make sure that the content is justifiably there on the page.  I've seen some people "mask" their landing pages in they will show the search bots a long, informative article, but a user who visits the webpage will be redirected via javascript redirect (which bots can't follow) or will overlay the page with an iframe (which bots can't see) to show the user one thing but the bots something completely different.  In my opinion, this goes too far and is manipulative, which might see your page and/or site penalised.  With this, you are deliberately misleading the bots and/or users with what you want them to see.  I would think that a plugin that injects content would possibly be seen the same way.

I suppose there is a bit of a grey area but in my earlier example it allows the users and the bots to see, if they so choose, the exact same page and layout.  The difference is that you are styling some content so that the design and user experience is one that is tailored, but you are not restricting either the bot or the user from seeing the full landing page should they so wish.  That (again, in my opinion) is acceptable.

So with that in mind I would look at incorporating design elements that allow the content to be displayed if wanted, but can be folded away by default.  Expandable content, tabbed content, accordion menus - there are a number of ways you can do this. Try not to be deliberately misleading, but definitely design your web page around what you want your user to see.

Hope this helps.