Opt-in Form as Hidden Text - what do you think?
-
Hi All,
I have at least 2 website that have opt-in form that isn't visible all the time (cookie related). Also, the thank you message will appear (obviously) only after signing in.
Here how it looks like:
Sign up to receive exclusive updates and special offers
Congratulations on joining our email list!
You will be the first to know about exciting news, red carpet updates, special offers, and much more.There seems to be a problem with a signup. Please try again later.
What do you think? It may penalize my website or do you find it legit?
-
Hi Shahar,
Thanks for the question.
As the other guys have said, it's hard to predict how the search engines will react to hidden content. In this case though, I highly doubt that this form would cause a penalty. You're not hiding this content with the intent of manipulation or anything like that and if a Googler were to look at this, they'd see that you're not to hide anything bad.
I hope that helps!
Paddy
-
Hi Sharar,
It is hard to say definitively what the Search Engines will make of this text, as it is consistent between pages, they will likely class it as template content, rather than page content, but it will still be assessed as something.
To be on the safe side, is it possible to have this content only populate the
via javascript? I am assuming the Class or style on thatchanges so it appears, so when doing that, you could put the text in rather than just changing it's visibility?
However, doing this will take those words out of your word count, so I would recommend upping the text content on at least your most important pages, (if not all pages) to compensate for this.
Kind Regards
Jimmy
-
Anybody?
-
Hi Alice,
This form and code are on every single page, including the homepage
Do you still think it's not problematic?
When I check the cached version (text only) I can see it as part of the overall text
-
Hi Sahar,
As far as I know crawler doesn't submit form and crawler wouldn't find the page that comes after submission. No it won't penalize your site.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
-
Hi,
As the hidden text does not contain any of your keywords, I would be surprised if any search engines had a problem with the content in such a markup.
If that content was keyword heavy and hidden from view then you would be likely to incur scrutiny from the search engines.
Kind Regards
Jimmy
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
-
Should you bother disallowing low quality links with brand/non-commercial anchor text?
Hi Guys, Doing a link audit and have come across lots of low quality web directories pointing to the website. Most of the anchor text of these directories are the websites URL and not comercial/keyword focused anchor text. So if thats the case should we even bother doing a link removal request via google webmaster tools for these links, as the anchor text is non-commercial? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spyaccounts140 -
Combining images with text as anchor text
Hello everyone, I am working to create sub-category pages on our website virtualsheetmusic.com, and I'd like to have your thoughts on using a combination of images and text as anchor text in order to maximize keyword relevancy. Here is an example (I'll keep it simple): Let's take our violin sheet music main category page located at /violin/, which includes the following sub-categories: Christmas Classical Traditional So, the idea is to list the above sub-categories as links on the main violin sheet music page, and if we had to use simple text links, that would be something like: Christmas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau
Classical
Traditional Now, since what we really would like to target are keywords like: "christmas violin sheet music" "classical violin sheet music" "traditional violin sheet music" I would be tempted to make the above links as follows: Christmas violin sheet music
Classical violin sheet music
Traditional violin sheet music But I am sure that would be too much overwhelming for the users, even if the best CSS design were applied to it. So, my idea would be to combine images with text, in a way to put those long-tail keywords inside the image ALT tag, so to have links like these: Christmas
Classical
Traditional That would allow a much easier way to work the UI , and at the same time keep relevancy for each link. I have seen some of our competitors doing that and they have top-notch results on the SEs. My questions are: 1. Do you see any negative effect of doing this kind of links from the SEO standpoint? 2. Would you suggest any better way to accomplish what I am trying to do? I am eager to know your thoughts about this. Thank you in advance to anyone!1 -
Internal Links Query - What should be use as anchor text
Hello All, We are looking at our internal links and most of them say "More" or "View All" The "more" anchor Text links - are usually positioned on the Body Content as we only display a portion of the content and then the user clicks more to see all the content ? - Should we be changing the "More" Text to something more keyword /phrase friendly i.e " more information about carpet cleaning" or "more information on Tool hire" or would that be deemed as spammy ? thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Google's form for "Small sites that should rank better" | Any experiences or results?
Back in August of 2013 Google created a form that allowed people to submit small websites that "should be ranking better in Google". There is more info about it in this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-small-site-survey-17295.html Has anybody used it? Any experiences or results you can share? *private message if you do not want to share publicly...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
Search engine simulators are not finding text on my website. Do I have a problem with Javascript or AJAX?
My website text is not appearing in search engine simulators. Is there a problem with the javascript? Or perhaps AJAX is affecting it? Is there a tool I can use to examine how my website architecture is affecting how the site is crawled? I am totally lost. Help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ecigseo0 -
Links from music/celebrity based fansites - sitewide images with no alt text
We're currently in the middle of a link audit on our website OneDirection.net and a large part of our incoming links come from fansites such as the following: ladygaganow.net nickjonline.com justinbieberhood.com joejonashq.com harrystylesfan.org brunodaily.org onedirectiondaily.com onedirectionfans.net Now, our previous way of thinking was that these are very relevant websites in the same niche as us, and therefore should be passing some value? However all of the links on these sites come from sitewide images with no alt-text. Some of the sites are passing 1000+ links to us. We've been wary to disavow or request removal of these links as we've usually gone with the thinking that Google applies "common-sense" based logic in its algorithms, and therefore these backlinks should be ok - in our opinion. However we think we are suffering from some kind of algorithmic penalty with our current rankings, and are now thinking these could be the cause. What are people's opinions on these links? Should we stay clear of sitewide links altogether? Should we contact the site owners and try to get them to mix up the alt-text? Or should we get rid of them altogether? Thanks, Chris.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PixelKicks0 -
Best way to set up anchor text on parked pages?
Our company is no longer offering a series of products, much to the disappointment of our SEO team since we've spent a long time building up the pages and getting them ranked organically. The pages all have decent page rank and in some cases rank #1 for the primary keyword. We have a sister company that we acquired a year ago and they still offer these products on their website. They are a completely separate company with their own website which existed long before we acquired them and we have nothing to do with their website. Our team has proposed that rather than take down the URLs on our site for the products we no longer offer, to put a message saying something like "sorry we don't offer this anymore but you may be interested in this.." and then link to our sister company with anchor text so that they can get some benefit from our SEO efforts if we can't. The question/issue is how should we do that since there will be a lot of pages from the same domain, about 20 pages, all linking to a few pages on a different domain. Should the anchor text be varied unbranded or branded? On the one hand I think if we change up the anchor text used to link to another page many times from a single domain that looks strange and transparent to google. On the other hand unbranded text would be the better descriptor for users since we are deep linking to the product not the homepage of the other site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edu-SEO0 -
Spammy Link Profile Questions. What do you think?
I'm trying to dilute the link profile for a website. But have a couple of questions on the best way to achieve this. Current link profile, www.mysitename.com Keyword 1 Keyword 2 Keyword 3 Keyword 4 Keyword 5 Keyword 6 Keyword 7 Keyword 8 Keyword 9 Keyword 10 Keyword 12 Keyword 13 Keyword 14 Keyword 14 Keyword 15 mysitename.com Desired link profile, www.mysitename.com mysitename.com www.mysitename.com http://www. mysitename.com/ My Site Name http://mysitename.com Click Here my site name More Info mysitename.com/ www.mysitename.com/ Keyword 1 Keyword 2 Keyword 3 Keyword 4 Keyword 4 Keyword 5 Questions 1. Do you think Google looks at this on a domain level? Or do you think this needs to be done with every page on the site? 2. What would be a good way to build links fast to the pages, need to build lots of links to be able to dilute the profile. I was considering Dripable, or a similar service, but decided i really don't want to create more spam.What would you do? 3. What would you say the % threshold for anchor text is, i have read on different sources that at least 40% - 60% of links should be branded, url, or generic anchor links. Do you think this is accurate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 858-SEO0