Display None (Read More) Implimentation

[ATP]

Hi Mozzers, This question has been asked a few times over the years, but opinion seems to have changed drastically and i wanted to get an updated opinion from sources i trust.

On my category pages I have content above products. The content can push the product too far down, and if placed below is never viewed. To battle this I wanted to implement a "Read More" button so i could keep a couple hundred words there and expand it to the rest of the content if the user wanted. If not the products would remain near the top of the screen for better conversion.

I have implemented this on this page to test if it affects my keyword rankings before i go site wide. But also wanted an opinion if this practice is ok. The example page with it implemented can be found here.

The content im hiding isn't huge here but on other pages could be more. Is there a set ratio of text i should aim to keep / hide?

Any pitfalls i should watch out for?

I know google crawls the hidden content as its in the source code but should i be wary of a penalty is too much is hidden?

[ATP]

cheers rob, i will wait a week or 2 before rolling it site wide so i have to evidence of no effect to back me up incase it does go wrong and go from there.

thanks for your time

[Toddfoster]

In my experience, there is no such thing as "too far" with this tactic. We had a page with 5,000 words on it, but only about 1,000 showing, and it ranked just fine (extremely well, in fact). As long as your content is registered in your source code so Google can crawl/index it, you're golden. At the end of the day, Google doesn't register what a user can see in this context. It sees all the content and treats its ranking process of the page accordingly.

[ATP]

thanks for the reply rob.

if i had a page with 1000 words would it be too much to hide 800 in a similar way as this and only have 200 showing? or is it fine for the same reasons you have listed? can i go too far with it?

[Toddfoster]

Hello,

From your example, I see nothing wrong with your strategy. Hiding the text will retain the optimization and content when the page is crawled, but also makes the page/products readily available from a UX perspective. In this case, Google is crawling the Source Code and isn't worried about what a user sees.

We used a similar tactic on our Home Page to create content a user could read without stuffing the page/making it inaccessible. Our rankings were unaffected when we made the change.

As long as your content is withheld using a "Read More" button and doesn't appear on a separate page/URL, you are in good shape with what you have done here. You are still within Google's "Good Practice" realm.

Good luck moving forward with your site changes!

Rob