Hiding Text in an SEO friendly way - is it possible?
-
Hello,
I have a client who has very little (practically no) text content on his ecommerce website, on the home page and category / sub cat pages. We have drafted some text for him - but the designer has fought back against this as he feels it will break the design.
Our proposed solution is to have some text visible - and the rest will be text that is hidden but can be revealed by clicking Read More.
We are planning to follow these recommendations : http://www.shimonsandler.com/collapsible-div-seo-friendly/
We are not hiding text for the sake of it - but more to improve the UX. We of course want the text to be accessible - i.e. readable by screen readers.
Does anyone have any experience or opinions in respect to taking this course of action, and is there anything we should make sure we either do or not do to stay on the side of the BIG G?
Kind Regs,
Rich
-
This is gold dust - THANK YOU!!
-
Thanks Michael.
I agree completely. We are just trying to find a way to tick both boxes, UX and SEO - both of which, of course, are intricately connected. So an SEO friendly text reveal function seems like a good strategy all round. We are certainly not trying to hide text from users, and include it solely for SE's. I am just keen we do it in a way that is accessible and not in breach of Google's guidelines.
I usually push my opinion through and make sure there is text on the page, even if it looks ugly in a designers opinion. Because, ultimately, a site without traffic is not worth a whole lot, even if it looks amazing!
RB
-
Michael,
These are very clear steps that could be applied by many people in various situations.
You are a great leader !
Nice work!
E
-
Hi Rich,
Here you are not hiding anything for the fact. Hiding text is something else that would involve matching the color of the text with that of the background etc. Here you are just tying to make a better UX by having the Read More button that will reveal the content. The content is very much there on the same page and your intention is very clear here. Believe me my friend, Google has mastered the art of finding out the intentions of Webmasters by looking at the page and you will not have to bother about anything in this case.
Regards,
Devanur.
-
Clear and direct. The solution is change the designer.
-
Just to add to this.
A designers job is to design for content and design to make what they are creating successful.
I would start with informing the designer of the intended goals of the site. Then have a discussion around how they feel the current design they have created is accomplishing that.
If there are any holes in the design accomplishing those goals - then a discussion can take place on how strategy, content and design can come together.
The key is to help your designer understand this and lead the team to success.
If none of that works, talk to the owner and pull rank on the designer. Clients speak and think in terms of results - so make your case.
All you can do is provide thought leadership, fight for what you believe in and don't get pushed around or marginalized for common sense recommendations.
If no one wants to listen, you've just found a client not worth working for.
(But remember, it is your thought leadership and sensitivity to everyone's role that makes or breaks it, whether it be the owner, designer, developer, etc.)
Good luck!
-
:):) well said.
-
We have drafted some text for him - but the designer has fought back against this as he feels it will break the design.
I would not be able to have this person as a designer for one of my sites.
This person is not "on board" and I don't have time to pull his teeth.
Nuf said.
-
Hi Rich,
I think just this one act of hiding text will not get you in trouble however if you combine this with other black hat techniques or your site exhibits spammy behavior then you're definitely in trouble. If one is able to access all the content in a text only browser then you should be ok. I would still try and educate the client on having a small block of introductory text above the product and category pages that would also help with conversions.
Her's the official link on hidden text by Google.
Jill Whalen's forum addresses this question here
Here's another link on this topic
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
-
Pagination & SEO
Hi We have automatically created brand pages based on which brand they have in their attributes. At the moment, developers have restricted the ability to properly optimise these for SEO, but I also wanted to look at how we should handle pagination. Example: http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/manutan?page=1 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/manutan?page=2 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/manutan?page=3 Should we do any of the following - which I've found in an article: Put no follow on all links located on pagination pages Should we no index these pages as they are wasting crawl budget? - Don’t show links to page 2, 3, 4, 5… 10, 11, 12… at the end of your content but only a link to the next and previous pages so that you won’t dilute your page authority. Or does anyone else have any tips on how to handle these pages? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Multi-Store SEO
I am currently developing a website which will have a multi-store function, i.e. one for US & ROW customers and one for UK & EU customers. The domain names will be along the lines of: Original domain: www.website.com UK & EU domain: eu.website.com US & ROW domain: us.website.com When a customer visits the website they will be redirected to one or the other depending on their location. Can anyone see any problems which this may cause in respect to SEO? I know there may be a duplicate content issue here also, how should I best deal with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
How do I optimize dynamic content for SEO?
Hello, folks! I'm wondering how I optimize a site if it is built on a platform that works based on dynamic content. For example, the page pulls in certain information based on the information it has about the user. Not every user will see the same page. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Geonetric
Lindsey0 -
Mirrors Hosting SEO
Hello, I notice that some sites do provide hosting for mirroring file downloading for cpanel, apache and other big developers. I assume that benefits of it is link building but look at this site: http://apache.mirrors.hoobly.com/ Hoobly provide mirrors for most developers but none of them are indexed by google for ex: http://apache.mirrors.hoobly.com/ So can someone explain why would be that or what is going on ? is that something hidden here ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eriklogo50 -
What should be the SEO strategy for a very big target?
Currently I am doing SEO of an Arabic website. I need to optimize it for GCC region. Its target is very big i.e. 1 million unique visitors per month (organic). The domain is new means there is no domain authority right now. What should be the best strategy in this scenario?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sohail10 -
A few important mobile SEO questions
I have a few basic questions about mobile SEO. I'd appreciate if any of you fabulous Mozzers can enlighten me. Our site has a parallel mobile site with the same urls, using an m. domain for mobile and www. for desktop. On mobile pages, we have a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the matching desktop URL and on desktop pages we have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to the matching mobile URL. When someone visits a www. page using a mobile device, we 301 them to the mobile version. Questions: 1. Do I want my mobile pages to be indexed by Google? From Tom's (very helpful) answers here, it seems that I only want Google indexing the full site pages and if the mobile pages are indexed it's actually a duplicate content issue. This is really confusing to me since Google knows that it's not duplicate content based on the canonical tag. But - he makes a good point - what is the value of having the mobile page indexed if the same page on desktop is indexed (I know that Google is indexing both because I see them in search results. When I search on mobile Google serves the mobile page and when I search on desktop Google serves me the desktop page.)? Are these pages competing with each other? Currently, we are doing everything we can do ensure that our mobile pages are crawled (deeply) and indexed, but now I'm not sure what the value of this is? Please share your knowledge. 2. Is a mobile page's ranking affected by social shares of the desktop version of the same page? Currently, when someone uses the share buttons on our mobile site, we share the desktop url (www. - not m.). The reason we do this is that we are afraid that if people are sharing our content with 2 different url's (m.mysite.com/some_post and www.mysite.com/some_post) the share count will not be aggregated for both url's. What I'm wondering is: will this have a negative effect on mobile SEO, since it will seem to Google that our mobile pages have no shares, or is this not a problem, since the desktop pages have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to mobile pages, so Google gives the same ranking to the mobile page as the desktop page (which IS being shared)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Can SPA (single page architecture) websites be SEO friendly?
What is the latest consensus on SPA web design architecture and SEO friendliness?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robo342
By SPA, I mean rather than each page having its own unique URL, instead each page would have an anchor added to a single URL. For example: Before SPA: website.com/home/green.html After SPA: website.com/home.html#green (rendering a new page using AJAX) It would seem that Google may have trouble differentiating pages with unique anchors vs unique URLs, but have they adapted to this style of architecture yet? Are there any best practices around this? Some developers are moving to SPA as the state of the art in architecture (e.g., see this thread: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Google-crawling-websites-built-using-121615.S.219120193), and yet there may be a conflict between SPA and SEO. Any thoughts or black and white answers? Thanks.0 -
Link Age as SEO factor?
Hi Guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VividLime
I have a client who ranks well within a competitive sector of the travel industry. They are planning CMS move which will involve changing from .cfm to .aspx We will be doing the standard redirects etc However Matt's statement here on 301 redirects got me thinking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA&t=0m24s He says that basically you loose a bit of page rank when you do a 301 redirect. Now, we will be potentially redirecting 1000s of links and my thinking is 'a lot of a little, adds up to a lot' In other words, 1000s of redirects may have a big enough impact to loose some rankings in a very competitive and aggressive space. So recommended that we contact the sites who has the link highest value and ask them to manually change the links from cfm to aspx. This will then mean that there are no loss value as with a 301 redirect. -But now I have another dilemma which I'm unsure about. So the main question:
Is link age factor in rankings ? If I update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?0