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
-
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 -
Can white text over images hurt your SEO?
Hi everyone, I run a travel website that has about 30 pre-search city landing pages. In a redesign last year we added large "hero" images to the top of the page, and put our h1 headlines on top of them in white. The result is attractive, but I'm wondering if Google could be reading this page as "white text on white page", which is an obvious no-no, especially if it could seem that we're trying to hide text. Here's an example: http://www.eurocheapo.com/paris/ H1: Expert reviews of cheap hotels in Paris I should add that our SERPs for these city pages has dropped (for "Cheap hotels in X"), but it could obviously be related to other issues. Any advice would be appreciated. Many thanks! Tom
Web Design | | TomNYC0 -
My 404 page is showing a 4xx error. How can that be fixed?
My actual 404 page is giving a 4xx error.
Web Design | | sbetzen
The page address is http://www.ecowindchimes.com/v/404.asp It loads fine... it is the page all 404's are directed to. Why is it showing a 404 error. The page works. How can this be fixed? Stephen0 -
Yes or No for Ampersand "&" in SEO URLs
Hi Mozzers I would like to know how crawlers see the ampersand (& or &) in your URLs and if Google frown upon this or not? As far as I know they purely recognise this as "and" is this correct and is there any best practice for implementing this, as I know a lot of people complained before about & in links and that it is better to use it as &, but this is not on links, this is on URLs. Reason for this is that we looking to move onto an ASP.Net MVC framework (any suggestions for a different framework are welcome, we still just planning out future development) and in order to make use of the filter options we have on our site we need a parameter to indicate the difference on a routing level (routing sends to controller, controller sends to model, model sends to controller and controller sends to view < this is pattern of a request that comes in on the framework we will be using). I already have -'s and /'s in the URLs (which is for my SEO structuring) so these syntax can't be used for identifying filters the user clicks or uses to define their search as it will create a complete mess in the system. Now we looking at & to say; OK, when a user lands on /accommodation and they selects De Kelders (which is a destination in our area) the page will be /accommodation/de-kelders on this page they can define their search further to say they are looking for 5 star accommodation and it should be close to the beach, this is where the routing needs some guidance and we looking to have it as follow: /accommodation/de-kelders/5-star&close-to-the-beach. Now, does the "&" get identified by search engines on a URL level as "and" and does this cause any issues with crawling or indexation or would it be best to look at another solution? Thanks, Chris Captivate
Web Design | | DROIDSTERS0 -
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 -
Can "poor" subdomains drop PR of the root domain?
The page rank of my company's website has dropped from a 6 to a 4 over the past year or so. In that time, we implemented subdomains for development sites to show clients progress on their websites. I noticed that our "dev" sites are being indexed while in development and my question is, will Google drop pagerank of our root domain purely off of these "dev" subdomains? Example - our site is www.oursite.com Dev site - development1.oursite.com I just began investigating the drop and this came to my mind yesterday but am not too sure what type of impact these non-credible subdomains will have on our root domain. Any thoughts?
Web Design | | ckilgore0 -
Old SEO keyword "articles", are they hurting rankings?
Hello, About two years ago, the company I work for hired an SEO firm to improve organic rankings on our site. The SEO company's primary method for doing this was producing "articles" that are not really articles but keyword stuffed pages with lots of hidden, internal links to other legitimate pages on our site. Examples: http://www.creamright.com/Isi-Chargers-articles.html http://www.creamright.com/How-To-Make-Whipped-Cream-article.html http://www.creamright.com/Cream-Whipper-articles.html Obviously, this strategy wasn't greatly successful and we cancelled our work with the firm. However, we still have all of the "articles" on the site (about 50-60 pages total) and each page is navigable from the html and XML sitemaps. Additionally, the SEO firm we used built a lot of useless links to these pages from BS directory sites which are all still active. The question I have is whether we should remove these "article" pages or should leave them alone? Although I'm sure they aren't helping any of our SEO efforts, could deleting the pages after two years negatively impact our search rankings? Thanks in advance for any help on this, Doug M.
Web Design | | Loganshark1 -
Text-align: -900% in an absolute element?
I'm having a hard time doing image replacement in an absolute element. I know there is a replacement technique which is ideal for this but the text is larger then the window so when the image is shown over the text, a part would still be visible. Could anyone help me any further?
Web Design | | ldestrooper0