Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Fading in content above the fold on window load
-
Hi,
We'd like to render a font stack from Typekit and paint a large cover image above the fold of our homepage after document completion. Since asynchronously loading anything generally looks choppy, we fade in the affected elements when it's done. Sure, it gives a much smoother feeling and fast load times, but I have a concern about SEO.
While Typekit loads, h1, h2 and the page's leading paragraph are sent down the wire with an invisible style (but still technically exist as static html). Even though they appear to a user only milliseconds later, I'm concerned that a search engine's initial request is met with a page whose best descriptive assets are marked as invisible.
Both UX and SEO have high value to our business model, so we're asking for some perspective to make the right kind of trade off. Our site has a high domain authority compared to our competition, and sales keyword competition is high. Will this UX improvement damage our On-Page SEO? If so and purely from an SEO perspective, roughly how serious will the impact be?
We're eager to hear any advice or comments on this. Thanks a lot.
-
Hi,
For starters you could use the ‘Fetch as Google’ option in Webmasters Tools and see what your page looks like to search engines, or use a tool like browseo.net to do the same thing. Or you could make sure the page is indexable and link to it from somewhere and do a search for “one of your hidden text strings” (in quotes) to see if that content has been crawled and indexed.
If you can’t see your content then you may have a problem, and as crawlers can distinguish between hidden and nothidden text it may be more than just blocking your content from helping you rank. It might actually look like you’re trying to stuff keywords into your content without showing them to the user.
I think the easiest and simplest fix would be to remove the class which makes these elements invisible, and dynamically add that class with a little bit of jQuery just for users with scripts enabled:
This way when a crawler (or a user with javascript disabled) visits your site they will be served the page with the content visible, with it only being hidden if the visitor is accessing the site with javascript enabled.
Hope this helps,
Tom
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google ranking content for phrases that don't exist on-page
I am experiencing an issue with negative keywords, but the “negative” keyword in question isn’t truly negative and is required within the content – the problem is that Google is ranking pages for inaccurate phrases that don’t exist on the page. To explain, this product page (as one of many examples) - https://www.scamblermusic.com/albums/royalty-free-rock-music/ - is optimised for “Royalty free rock music” and it gets a Moz grade of 100. “Royalty free” is the most accurate description of the music (I optimised for “royalty free” instead of “royalty-free” (including a hyphen) because of improved search volume), and there is just one reference to the term “copyrighted” towards the foot of the page – this term is relevant because I need to make the point that the music is licensed, not sold, and the licensee pays for the right to use the music but does not own it (as it remains copyrighted). It turns out however that I appear to need to treat “copyrighted” almost as a negative term because Google isn’t accurately ranking the content. Despite excellent optimisation for “Royalty free rock music” and only one single reference of “copyrighted” within the copy, I am seeing this page (and other album genres) wrongly rank for the following search terms: “free rock music”
On-Page Optimization | | JCN-SBWD
“Copyright free rock music"
“Uncopyrighted rock music”
“Non copyrighted rock music” I understand that pages might rank for “free rock music” because it is part of the “Royalty free rock music” optimisation, what I can’t get my head around is why the page (and similar product pages) are ranking for “Copyright free”, “Uncopyrighted music” and “Non copyrighted music”. “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted” don’t exist anywhere within the copy or source code – why would Google consider it helpful to rank a page for a search term that doesn’t exist as a complete phrase within the content? By the same logic the page should also wrongly rank for “Skylark rock music” or “Pretzel rock music” as the words “Skylark” and “Pretzel” also feature just once within the content and therefore should generate completely inaccurate results too. To me this demonstrates just how poor Google is when it comes to understanding relevant content and optimization - it's taking part of an optimized term and combining it with just one other single-use word and then inappropriately ranking the page for that completely made up phrase. It’s one thing to misinterpret one reference of the term “copyrighted” and something else entirely to rank a page for completely made up terms such as “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted”. It almost makes me think that I’ve got a better chance of accurately ranking content if I buy a goat, shove a cigar up its backside, and sacrifice it in the name of the great god Google! Any advice (about wrongly attributed negative keywords, not goat sacrifice ) would be most welcome.0 -
Best practices for publishing sponsored content
Hello, Our website hosts sponsored content from different brands. Should we be listing the sponsor either on the frontend and/or through markup? - Would either way have any sort of an impact? The content itself is already clearly marked as 'sponsored content' but we were more interested in listing the specific sponsor. Also, we’re assuming the outbound links would need to be marked rel="sponsored" but are there any other best practices we should be implementing? Any insight would be appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | Ben-R
Thank you in advance.
Best,0 -
Writing cornerstone content for a shop (eCommerce) website
Hi there I am trying to optimise my site to the best that it can be. Since the most recent Google updates, everything that I reading is saying cornerstone content with lots of valuable content is a really good strategy as it tells Google what is the most important content on your site. Writing articles that are well structured and have give the user a detailed overview of that subject. Lots of top SEO's are saying 3000 words plus on these pages. My question is, how do I go about this with and eCommerce site? Obviously that majority of the keywords that I want to target are product related and these are the pages that I want to come up in the search. How do I go about creating cornerstone content for these pages? I am thinking that one of my cornerstone pieces of content would be "The Ultimate Guide to [my main product category]". But that product has numerous products related to it, all of which have their own keywords, so how would this help the products to rank? The site had two main product categories, with numerous products under each of those categories. The two main categories are targeting my best performing keywords, but currently the landing page for these is the main product category pages. I am really struggling to work out the best strategy here. The content that I have on my actual products pages is comprehensive and covers a lot of detail about that particular product and has started to rank for product keywords, but I am guessing Google wouldn't consider that to be cornerstone content. I hope this make sense. Any advice anyone can give would be really useful. Many thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | Clojobobo1 -
Does using Yoast variables for meta content overwrite any pages that already have custom meta content?
The question is about the Yoast plugin for WP sites. Let's say I have a site with 200 pages and custom meta descriptions / title tags already in place for the top 30 pages. If I use the Yoast variable tool to complete meta content for the remaining pages (and make my Moz issue tracker look happier), will that only affect the pages without custom meta descriptions or will it overwrite even the pages with the custom meta content that I want? In this situation, I do want to keep the meta content that is already in place on select pages. Thanks! Zack
On-Page Optimization | | rootandbranch0 -
Quick H1 Above the Fold Question
I was wondering if the H1 for this page was alright even though it is below the fold: http://www.seniorplanning.org/assisted-living-phoenix-arizona/. Any suggestions/comments would be very helpful. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | JacobEdward0 -
Duplicate Content - Blog Rewriting
I have a client who has requested a rewrite of 250 blog articles for his IT company. The blogs are dispersed on a variety of platforms: his own website's blog, a business innovation website, and an IT website. He wants to have each article optimised with keyword phrases and then posted onto his new website thrice weekly. All of this is in an effort to attract some potential customers to his new site and also to establish his company as a leader in its field. To what extent would I need to rewrite each article so as to avoid duplicating the content? Would there even be an issue if I did not rewrite the articles and merely optimised them with keywords? Would the articles need to be completely taken by all current publishers? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | StoryScout0 -
Page content length...does it matter?
As I begin developing my website's content, does it matter how long or short the actual text found in the is? I heard someone say before "a minimum of 250 words", but is that true? If so, what is the maximum length I should use?
On-Page Optimization | | wlw20090 -
Best practice for franchise sites with duplicated content
I know that duplicated content is a touchy subject but I work with multiple franchise groups and each franchisee wants their own site, however, almost all of the sites use the same content. I want to make sure that Google sees each one of these sites as unique sites and does not penalize them for the following issues. All sites are hosted on the same server therefor the same IP address All sites use generally the same content across their product pages (which are very very important pages) *templated content approved by corporate Almost all sites have the same design (A few of the groups we work with have multiple design options) Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Again Aaron
On-Page Optimization | | Shipyard_Agency0