Legitimate hidden text and H1s are "OK?" Show me the data!
-
I'm trying to promote the SEO perspective during a site redesign so I'm researching the impact of design requests:
-
Embedding text in graphic headers and applying
to the graphics to get the SEO value
-
Reducing view-able text on a page for design reasons and by using JavaScript to hide text in accordions or tabs.
SEOmoz uses these techniques on their ranking report and most of what I read in teh forums says it is OK to hide text if your motives are pure and the text displays in a text-only browser.
But I do SEO, not SEOK. I want to optimize, not just avoid penalties. And I try to make decisions based on data, not just anecdotes. Are there any studies out there on the effects these hidden-text topics?
How much difference DOES it make to have the text exposed? Since there is potential for spam with these techniques, why would Google give the same rank to pages with and without hidden text? When I'm balancing UX and SEO, I want to clearly define the trade-off.
What have you done when faced with this dilemma?
-
-
oh... those pages with the hidden text on Google properties....
I hate those pages. Hate them. Hate them.
They usually have trivial content too. A whole page with a few sentences and you have to view 15 pages to get the information that you need.
They should be smacked by panda.
Did I say that I really dislike those pages.
-
Thanks EGOL. It is good to have an example of the accordion technique hurting traffic. This is becoming so common I'm surprised there isn't more out about it. Interestingly, Google itself uses hidden text extensively in its Chromebook site, look at the content behind the tiles further down on the How It's Different page. And I frequently see
applied to images as is done on the carousel for Isite design. Is it just that they are counting on other factors?
I'd sure like to see an exhaustive study on this. (SEOmoz, this is your cue to jump in with data already out there or to take this research on!)
-
Luke, here is the story....
I had a big FAQ page that was really long. I wanted to organize it with an accordion page. When people landed on the page they were instrucuted to "click a topic" and the accordion would open - when it opened all of the questions about a single topic were displayed.
When I installed the accordion page the words on the page changed very little but traffic into that page from google dropped by 80%.
So, I removed the accordion and placed topic links in large font at the top of the page. when people enter they were still instructed to "click a topic". The visitor was then moved down the page where questions about that topic were presented.
After changing that traffic from google search jumped back up. Visitor engagement remained about the same - pageviews and time on site is about the same.
-
Thanks EGOL, this is an interesting piece of anecdotal evidence for me.
I have been wondering along the same lines as the OP - specifically because I'm a little concerned that Google is parsing javascript now (in some cases) and may be iffy about javascript copy truncation. However, I would view this in my own case, as a user experience improvement.
For example : I sometimes use javascript to truncate my copy where I feel it may push other content too far down the page. Some users will want to read the whole passage, but others will be scanning for the content further down.
Is this the type of 'hidden text' you are referring to? The full content is easily accessible at the click of a 'show more' link. The content is hidden by the javascript, so will be available to user agents that do not execute javascript.
-
I could not agree more with EGOL. Text on a web page should appear as text, not within images. With CSS3 and current design standards, there is rarely a reason to do otherwise.
About the only place on a site where I permit text within an image is within the logo.
I am not aware of even the slightest SEO value from applying a header tag to a graphic.
-
"Embedding text in graphic headers and applying
to the graphics to get the SEO value"
I want as much text as possible on the page. Every diverse word pulls in longtail traffic.
And... applying
to a graphic for SEO value? Why do you think that will work? Just use text.
"Reducing view-able text on a page for design reasons and by using JavaScript to hide text in accordions or tabs."
Any time I have done this the SEO value of the text is lost. That's what my analytics tells me from lost long tail traffic.
If a designer told me that he needed to hide text for design purposes. I would challenge him to find a way to put the text on the page and make it look great. If he was not up to that challenge I would have a new designer.
Others might disagree. That's OK.
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
-
Items 30 - 50", however this is not accurate. Articles/Pages/Products counts are not close to this, products are 100+, so are the articles. We would want to either hide this or correct this.
We are running into this issue where we see items 30 -50 appear underneath the article title for google SERP descriptions . See screenshot or you can preview how its appearing in the listing for the site here: https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=5I5fX939L6qxytMPh_el4AQ&q=site%3Adarbyscott.com&oq=site%3Adarbyscott.com&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQAzoICAAQsQMQgwE6BQgAELEDOgIIADoECAAQCjoHCAAQsQMQClDYAljGJmC9J2gGcAB4AIABgwOIAYwWkgEIMjAuMy4wLjKYAQCgAQGqAQdnd3Mtd2l6sAEA&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwjd_4nR_ejrAhWqmHIEHYd7CUwQ4dUDCAk&uact=5 Items 30 - 50", however this is not accurate and we are not sure what google algorithm is counting. . Articles/Pages/Products counts are not close to this, products are 100+, so are the articles. Anyone have any thoughts on what google is pulling for the count and how to correct this? We would want to either hide this or correct this. view?usp=sharing
Web Design | | Raymond-Support0 -
Why Is Google Showing My Images Upside Down in the Index?
Hi, My client has PDFs of their catalog on the site which google is indexing. However, it seems that google is taking an image from the catalog and then showing it upside in the index for images/search results. The images are not upside down on the site. Has anyone heard of this happening before or does anyone know a way to fix it? Thanks
Web Design | | AliMac260 -
Moz crawl showing up ?s=keyword pages as errors
Hi all, Hoping someone can she some light on a fix with ref to wordpress and the search function it uses as Moz is craling some pages which reference the search domain.com/?s=keyword Errors showing up are duplicate pages, descriptions and titles. The search function is not important on this site and I have tried to use a plugin which disables the search page which it does but these errors still show up. Can anyone assist as this is the final piece of the puzzle and then we're down to 0 issues on the site.
Web Design | | wtfi0 -
Our "home page" is behind a member wall, options?
So www.pch.com(portal) redirects to www.pch.com/unrecognized(landing page) if you are not registered with us and logged in. This means that the search engines are not logged in, so they see only our landing page. It used to be that there was no portal/home, on pch.com, that was just the landing page, but that changed about 6 months ago. We do rank for our brand terms, but my company would like to rank for terms like "sweepstakes." They DO understand why we don't, thankfully. They don't think SEO is magic voodoo. They get it. But they asked for options, as I have said that the portal on www.pch.com really is a good page to optimize for non-brand, core terms like sweepstakes....but only if the search engines can see it. I gave them these options, and they asked me to seek out more. So any thoughts would be good: 1. Best case scenario would be to abandon the landing page, just have the keyword rich portal page be the actual home page with no re-direct. (this won't happen, but I decided it needed to be first on my list). 2. Turn the portal into the home page (remove the redirect), but have the landing page overlay in a light box. This should, if I am not mistaken, be a best of both worlds situation, where the light box landing page would still have all of the value of the actual keyword rich portal page behind it. 3. If the landing page has to remain as it does now with the non-logged in redirect to it, change the URLs so that the landing page is www.pch.com and the portal becomes www.pch.com/members/ or something like that. Any other thoughts? Thanks! Kenn Gold Publishers Clearing House
Web Design | | Kenn_Gold0 -
Too Many On Page Links, rel="nofollow" and rel="external"
Hi, Though similar to other questions on here I haven't found any other examples of sites in the same position as mine. It's an e-commerce site for mobile phones that has product pages for each phone we sell. Each tariff that is available on each phone links through to the checkout/transfer page on the respective mobile phone network. Therefore when the networks offer 62 different tariffs that are available on a single phone that means we automatically start with 62 on page links that helps to quickly tip us over the 100 link threshold. Currently, we mark these up as rel="external" but I'm wondering if there isn't a better way to help the situation and prevent us being penalised for having too many links on page so: Can/should we mark these up as rel="nofollow" instead of, or as well as, rel="external"? Is it inherently a problem from a technical SEO point of view? Does anyone have any similar experiences or examples that might help myself or others? As always, any help or advice would be much appreciated 🙂
Web Design | | Tinhat0 -
Can google crawl text in jquery sliders?
We are redesigning our website and want to present a fair amount of text within jquery sliders. Will google crawl this text or is it treated the same way as actual script? Perhaps there is a way to just have the text as plain html but use jquery to display it?
Web Design | | Netboost0 -
H1 Tag, necessary or not? Hidden or not?
Our new site design utilizes H1 tags on all pages except the home page. We couldn't find a way to work it into the design. That being said, what's the opinion on necessity? Do we need an H1? If we do the image replacement thing, will that be better for SEO than none at all? Our old site had one and once we changed it to the term we wanted to optimize for we made the top 10 in less than 60 days. We don't want to lose that placement. Thoughts? You input is very much appreciated.
Web Design | | BMDM0 -
How does the toolbar caclulate text to code ratio?
I am seeing some very weird text to code ratios on a competitor site (over 100%) through the Analyze feature on the SEOmoz toolbar. I'm wondering how that's calculated, and what my competitors might be doing to raise that ratio so high artificially. I need to turn in a report on this soon, any help is greatly appreciated!! EHR
Web Design | | EHR0