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.
Seo and CSS media queries
-
Hello to all participants!
I'm starting on responsive design with css media queries and I was wondering if hidding content can, in this case, can also be bad for seo?
I know that hidding content is bad (eg. display: none;), but is it also like that with responsive design or does Google see it other way?
If I have a news column with title, image and text for 1024px and hide the text and image leaving just the title for 768px, or smaller, will Google consider this black hat and will it be bad for seo?
are there any articles I can read about this subject, and other similar subjects?
sorry for my english

thanks
-
First of all, for the benefit of the discussion it's worth pointing out that the Googlebot will ignore the CSS code and read whatever is in those tags.
Using tags like "display: none" and other similar ones will not by itself result in the Googlebot sounding the alarm. It is sophisticated enough to recognise that many web designs use the tags for a better look at the website and UX experience.
Where it might start getting angry (and you won't like it when it's angry) is when it finds links within the tags - particularly those that point to completely irrelevant webpages and/or spammy ones. If that happens, it's quite a big no-no, as it will think you're trying to hide these links from Google for nefarious reasons. Similarly a whole bunch of content that could be duplicate and/or is being used for keyword stuffing etc would also sound the alarm.
Provided you avoid that, I wouldn't worry about using the tags, as it can be useful for a number of reasons. Worth remembering, however, that the Googlebot will crawl and see whatever is hidden in their anyway.
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
-
How do elements that are displayed when scrolled impact SEO?
Hi, We are wanting to implement Animate.css and Wowjs on our site and were concerned about the SEO impacts. Basically when the page is loaded, if the element is not within the viewport then the HTML tag (i.e. div tag) have a style="visibility: hidden" and once the element is within the viewport it will change to have style="visibility: visible". Would having the style="visibility: hidden" negatively impact SEO?
Web Design | | KendallHershey0 -
Prismic.io CMS and SEO?
Looking for community feedback: Some of our In house developers want to use Prismic.io over Wordpress for it's alleged ease of organizing and "deploying" content. It's essentially a repository for content from which you make API calls to. It's a rather new platform. There a few posts in Quora around SEO but looking to see if anyone has had experience with platform. My concern is around page load times, excessive server requests, and content viewed as code. Any thoughts/ experiences would be much appreciated!
Web Design | | ArcherMalmo0 -
Best SEO practice - Umbrella brand with several domains
Hi, we have several blogs and comparison sites on specific topics. All the domains rank on top positions in very competitive niche markets. We think that we can get more profit out of the domains when we put them under an umbrella brand. Customers that visit domain A can then also find products easily on domain B. We see this for example on health.com, with several brands in the top. To maintain or improve our rankings i'm looking for specific information for the link structure. For example, is it better to have the 'about us'/rel=author on each domain, with contributors on that specific domain or is it better to have them all in the (umbrella) brand domain. At the moment we have the structure like this: domainA.com, domainA.com/blog, domainA.com/about-us and domainB.com, domainB.com/blog, domainB.com/about-us. I think to maintain the rankings it is best to keep specific content (like blog/ about us) on the domain. So is it the best to just do side wide links with a logo (like health.com) and what about hosting? We work with wordpress, so all domains will be hosted on one ip? when we use the multiple site option of WP? All information on this topic is more than welcome 🙂
Web Design | | remkoallertz0 -
Can anyone recommend a tool that will identify unused and duplicate CSS across an entire site?
Hi all, So far I have found this one: http://unused-css.com/ It looks like it identifies unused, but perhaps not duplicates? It also has a 5,000 page limit and our site is 8,000+ pages....so we really need something that can handle a site larger than their limit. I do have Screaming Frog. Is there a way to use Screaming Frog to locate unused and duplicate CSS? Any recommendations and/or tips would be great. I am also aware of the Firefix extensions, but to my knowledge they will only do one page at a time? Thanks!
Web Design | | danatanseo0 -
Do pull quotes affect SEO positively or negatively?
I like the design element of a pull quote to ad interest and highlight an important point. If I use an exact quote from the page in a pull quote on that page, does that negatively affect SEO as duplicate content? Are there formatting or tagging methods that could help pull quotes to boost SEO? For clarity, by "pull quote" I mean a stylized bit of text that floats on a page in such a way that the body text wraps around it. It is actual text (not text embedded in a graphic) but it behaves like an image with text wrapping around it. Here's an example (in red on the right side): http://www.21ct.com/resources/news-room/21ct-announces-its-latest-us-patent-for-advancing-big-data-security/
Web Design | | kyle21ct0 -
SEO Issues From Image Hotlinking?
I have a client who is hotlinking their images from one of their domains. I'm assuming the images were originally stored on the first domain (let's call it SiteA.com) and when they were putting together SiteB.com, they decided to just link to the images directly on SiteA.com instead of moving the images to Site B. Essentially hotlinking. Site A is not using the images in any way and in essence is just a gateway for their other sites and in this case a storage for their images. It doesn't use those images at all, so it really doesn't get any benefits of the images being referenced since I read that Google sometimes counts that hotlinking as a "vote" for the original image. But again, since ite A doesn't use the images that are being hotlinked at all, there's no benefit for Site A. My concern is that it's affecting their SEO for Site B because it makes it look like Site B is simply scraping data by hotlinking those images from Site A. Their programmer suggested creating a virtual directory so that it "looked" like it was coming from Site B. My guess is that Google can see this, so then not only will it look like Site B is scaping/hotlinking images, but also trying to hide it which may send up red flags to Google. My suggesstion to them was to just upload the images correctly into their own images directory on Site B. They own the images, so there's not any copyright issue, but that if they want proper SEO credit for that content, it all needs to be housed on the correct server and not hotlinked. Am I correct in this or will the virtual directory serve just as well?
Web Design | | GeorgiaSEOServices1 -
Best layout pages for SEO
Dear all, what would be the ideal layout of a webpage for SEO? How would a homepage and landingspage look like? Thanks in advance! Best regards, Ben
Web Design | | HMK-NL0 -
Should I Remove URL extentions for SEO?
We are having a developer design our website with Magento. I noticed the main pages such as About Us have no file extention in the URL. But the product pages have a .html file extention. I was once told to remove the file extentions. Are there benefits to removing the .html file extension and if so, is there a way we can do this using Magento?
Web Design | | hfranz0