Google's Stance on "Hidden" Content
-
Hi,
I'm aware Google doesn't care if you have helpful content you can hide/unhide by user interaction. I am also aware that Google frowns upon hiding content from the user for SEO purposes. We're not considering anything similar to this.
The issue is, we will be displaying only a part of our content to the user at a time.
We'll load 3 results on each page initially. These first 3 results are static, meaning on each initial page load/refresh, the same 3 results will display. However, we'll have a "Show Next 3" button which replaces the initial results with the next 3 results. This content will be preloaded in the source code so Google will know about it.
I feel like Google shouldn't have an issue with this since we're allowing the user action to cycle through all results. But I'm curious, is it an issue that the user action does NOT allow them to see all results on the page at once?
I am leaning towards no, this doesn't matter, but would like some input if possible. Thanks a lot!
-
I don't think you're looking at a penalty situation, if that's what you are asking. Seems perfectly legitimate.
The more interesting question to me is how Google will "weigh" the hidden content in it's algorithm. I suspect that anything that is hidden by javascript (or another method) will hold less weight than text in plain sight. You could try Google's new "Fetch and Render" tool in Webmaster Tools to see how Google views the page. Anything that doesn't display might not get as much consideration as plain text.
Of course, this is a lot of speculation. We don't really know for sure how Google treats text like this, but it's a pretty common situation.
-
Anyone else want to take a crack at this?
-
Hi Alrockn,
I'm not sure you understood the question. Thank you for reading.
-
Sounds similar to paginate issues, and the potential to create duplicate content in the eye's of google, particularly if you're using a template. Not a serious issue if this occurs for 1 or 2 clicks, but if viewer are going to do this for 5 or more times after the initial landing page, it might be a problem with the meta-tags.
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
-
Google has discovered a URL but won't index it?
Hey all, have a really strange situation I've never encountered before. I launched a new website about 2 months ago. It took an awfully long time to get index, probably 3 weeks. When it did, only the homepage was indexed. I completed the site, all it's pages, made and submitted a sitemap...all about a month ago. The coverage report shows that Google has discovered the URL's but not indexed them. Weirdly, 3 of the pages ARE indexed, but the rest are not. So I have 42 URL's in the coverage report listed as "Excluded" and 39 say "Discovered- currently not indexed." When I inspect any of these URL's, it says "this page is not in the index, but not because of an error." They are listed as crawled - currently not indexed or discovered - currently not indexed. But 3 of them are, and I updated those pages, and now those changes are reflected in Google's index. I have no idea how those 3 made it in while others didn't, or why the crawler came back and indexed the changes but continues to leave the others out. Has anyone seen this before and know what to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
Can 'follow' rather than 'nofollow' links be damaging partner's SEO
Hey guys and happy Monday! We run a content rich website, 12+ years old, focused on travel in a specific region, and advertisers pay for banners/content etc alongside editorial. We have never used 'nofollow' website links as they're no explicitly paid for by clients, but a partner has asked us to make all links to them 'nofollow' as they have stated the way we currently link is damaging their SEO. Could this be true in any way? I'm only assuming it would adversely affect them if our website was peanalized by Google for 'selling links', which we're not. Perhaps they're just keen to follow best practice for fear of being seen to be buying links. FYI we now plan to change to more full use of 'nofollow', but I'm trying to work out what the client is refering to without seeming ill-informed on the subject! Thank you for any advice 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO_Jim0 -
Why is Google no longer Indexing and Ranking my state pages with Dynamic Content?
Hi, We have some state specific pages that display dynamic content based on the state that is selected here. For example this page displays new york based content. But for some reason google is no longer ranking these pages. Instead it's defaulting to the page where you select the state here. But last year the individual state dynamic pages were ranking. The only change we made was move these pages from http to https. But now google isn't seeing these individual dynamically generated state based pages. When I do a site: url search it doesn't find any of these state pages. Any thoughts on why this is happening and how to fix it. Thanks in advance for any insight. Eddy By the way when I check these pages in google search console fetch as google, google is able to see these pages fine and they're not being blocked by any robot.txt.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eddys_kap0 -
Google Search Console "Change of Address" - Failed Redirection Test
I have a client who has a lot of domain variations, which have all been set up in Google Search Console. I requested that the client use the COA feature in GSC for the domains that are now redirecting to other domains that they own (which are set up in GSC). The problem is that we're not redirecting the homepages to the homepages of the destination domains. So, GSC is giving us this error message: fails redirection test: The old site redirects to www.domain.com/blog, which does not correspond to the new site you chose. Is our only way to use GSC COA for these domains to change the homepage redirect to go to the homepage of the destination domain? We don't really want that since the domain we're redirecting is a "blog.domain1.com" subdomain and we want to redirect it to "domain2.com/blog". Any help appreciated! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kernmedia
Dan0 -
Is it good practice to use "SAVE $1000's" in SEO titles and Meta Descriptions?
Our company sells a product system that will permanently waterproof almost anything. We market it as a DIY system. I am working on SEO titles and descriptions. This topic came up for discussion, if using "SAVE $1000's.." would help or hurt. We are trying to create an effective call to action, but we are wondering if search engines see it as click bait. Can you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tyler.louth0 -
Ranking drop for "Mobile" devices category in Google webmaster tools
Hi, Our rank dropped and we noticed it's a major drop in "Mobile" devices category, which is contributing to the overall drop. What exactly drops mobile rankings? We do not have any messages in search console. We have made few redirects and removed footer links. How these affect? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz
Satish0 -
'Nofollow' footer links from another site, are they 'bad' links?
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
one of my sites has about 1000 'nofollow' links from the footer of another of my sites. Are these in any way hurtful? Any help appreciated..0 -
Google Said "Repeat the search with the omitted results included."
We have some pages targeting the different countries but with the Near to Similar content/products, just distinguished with the country name etc. one of the page was assigned to me for optimizing. two or three Similar pages are ranked with in top 50 for the main keyword. I updated some on page content to make it more distinguish from others. After some link building, I found that this page still not showing in Google result, even I found the following message on the google. "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 698 already displayed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexgray
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." I clicked to repeat omitted result and found that my targeted url on 450th place in google (before link building this was not) My questions are Is google consider this page low quality or duplicate content? Is there any role of internal linking to give importance a page on other (when they are near to similar)? Like these pages can hurt the whole site rankings? How to handle this issue?0