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
-
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 -
Web Editing Pricing Quote
Hi all, I cannot seem to get my pagespeed up to the level I want, but I do not have the backend knowledge to fix the following errors listed below. I have played around with this for awhile, and gotten a number of them reduced, but these last ones are beyond me at this time. Any idea how long this would take someone proficient to do? Any idea what the cost would be? I know the ideas are going to be super general, but ball park is what I'm looking for. Thanks! Ruben Remove render-blocking JavaScript: http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/themes/kempruge/scripts/custom.js http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/themes/kempruge/scripts/rem-text-input.js Optimize CSS Delivery of the following: http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/themes/kempruge/style.css http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/themes/kempruge/fonts/stylesheet.css http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/plugins/sweetcaptcha-revolutionary-free-captcha-service/css/style.css?ver=3.6.1 http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/products/photocrati_nextgen/modules/nextgen_gallery_display/static/nextgen_gallery_related_images.css?ver=3.6.1 http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/plugins/contact-form-7/includes/css/styles.css?ver=3.5.3 http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/plugins/easing-slider/css/slideshow.min.css?ver=2.1.2 http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-nivo-slider/nivo-slider.css?ver=3.6.1 http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-nivo-slider/themes/default/default.css?ver=3.6.1
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Does using role="heading" instead of H1 in HTML code affects SEO?
Does using role="heading" instead of affect SEO? http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/Headings_using_role%3Dheading
Web Design | | LNEseo0 -
White Text / Black Background & SEO Impact
Does anyone know of any testing / studies with evidence that Google prefers dark text on a light background vs. light text on a dark background? I have a website that currently has light text on a black background, and really like the way it looks, but am concerned that the style may be hurting SEO. Moreover, redesigning something inverse with the same quality would be a large project and fairly costly, so I'd like to make sure the benefit will really be worth the cost before moving forward.
Web Design | | Bromtec0 -
Hey, So I know wordpress is built with a user capability, but what about databasing custom user data?
Hi everyone, so I am working on a project with a friend of mine, without getting into too much detail, here's the problem. We need users to sign in, then for instance, click a button, and then have that action record a value of 1 in a database on our server (preferably accessible through the wordpress admin interface, and in .csv format so that we can make it easy to work with) Any help with databasing, or if wordpress is already built with SOME database technology, etc, etc For instance, SEOmoz's "mozpoint" system.. Wordpress comes built with the ability for users to log in and have profiles with special access, etc, but does it have the ability to log points and values to a specific user as well? Where should I look? What should I google to figure out options? Who could I call / hire?
Web Design | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Does hidden content in jQuery ui tabs still get ignored?
I am looking for a more current answer to this question. I know that google leaves out the js and css. But since the code usually has display:hidden inline with the code while using jquery ui tabs I was curious to know if google considers this hidden or from what some articles have said, "tries to ignore the content". Is this still true today? I would assume no but looking for some back-up.
Web Design | | sknott0 -
Is it OK to 301 Redirect http://homepage.com to http://blog.homepage.com?
I don't have a homepage built yet, and I suspect that my blog will be my primary SEO draw in the long term, so I'd like to do a 301 redirect (for the techies, I'm doing it in Django with http.HttpResponsePermanentRedirect ) I just wanted to confirm that this wouldn't cause any problems as Google gets used to my page (it's only been up for a few days) Thanks! -matt
Web Design | | 49wetnoodles0 -
SEOMoz crawl report shows a duplicate content and duplicate title for these two url's http://freightmonster.com/ and http://freightmonster.com/index.html. How do I fix this?
What page is attached to http://freightmonster.com/ if it is not the index.html ? Should I do a redirect from the index page to something more descriptive?
Web Design | | FreightBoy1