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.
Harms of hidden categories on SEO
-
On our website we have some invisible/hidden categories on our site. Can anyone advise whether these are harmful in terms of SEO?
-
You could legitimately have hidden content in terms of category/URLs - maybe only made available if you sign up as an example. The guidelines are referring to manipulating on page content so there are elements within that page that are hidden and by default manipulating.
-
Firstly I cannot actually think of any legitimate reason for hiding or making a category invisible, however if you had one that means you don’t want the content to be indexed then you would be best blocking that Category within your robots.txt file.
If it is for any other reason and the content is indexable by ANY search engine not just Google then you run the risk of being penalised.
In fact, Google’s guidelines state that, “hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
-
Invisible to who? If they are invisible to the search engines (e.g. blocked via robots.txt) they could not be harmful, but if you gain any link or other quality equity through those pages, your will not get any additional domain authority or organic traffic to them.
That said, if the hidden categories were resorts of the main categories on your site then you would want to hide them from the search engine as they would be seen as low quality duplicate content. Otherwise if they were visible they could negatively impact your site.
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
-
Is page speed important to improve SEO ranking?
I saw on a SEO Agency's site (https://burstdgtl.com/search-engine-optimization/) that page speed apparently affects Google ranking. Is this true? And if it is, how do I improve it, do I need an agency?
On-Page Optimization | | jasparcj0 -
Are Wildcard Subdomain Hurting my SEO?
I have some sites with a lot of categories (category, sub-category, sub-subcategory) and locations (country, state/territory, city). To avoid listing pages really deep in my hierarchy I used wildcard subdomains for the locations, but lately I have been told that might be hurting my overall SEO efforts. I have a lot of URLs like https://city-state-country.example.com on one side of the domain and example.com/category/subcategory/subsubcategory on the other. In the middle you see stuff like city-state-country.example.com/category/subcategory/subsubcategory and everything in between. Would I be better off moving the locations to the right side of the domain name? Then you might find stuff like example.com/country/state/city/category/subcategory/subsubcategory and everything in between. I think I could do the new rewrite rules fairly easily since every country slug is just two characters long.
On-Page Optimization | | PostAlmostAnything0 -
Is using a H1 tag in a logo image bad for SEO?
We have brand logos on certain pages that have H1 tags in them - the H1 text being the brand's name, as this is what we'd want the title of the page to be. The logos are at the top of the page instead of a written title. But is this the best option for SEO? Do search engines value H1 tags in images as highly as a standard H1 tag?Would it be better for SEO to add an alt tag to the logo and add a separate H1 tag on the page that's also the name of the brand?
On-Page Optimization | | DVLighting0 -
SEO Implications of using Images for Article Titles
Hi guys! New to Moz Pro. I just recently completed an online course with Moz... I have a client who is writing some new content for their site, and we are approaching it with SEO in mind. I was wondering about using an image with text on it as the article title, instead of an actual "text on the page" title. Wondering if that's going to "cost" us anything, SEO wise. I guess we could use alt-text/title/description fields to make sure the keywords are crawlable for our article title but do they have less "weight" than a standard title? How does that work? Hope my question makes sense. Article header attached mB0PXsA.jpg
On-Page Optimization | | JakeWarren1 -
URL Path. What is better for SEO
Hello Moz people, Is it better for SEO to have a URL path like this: flowersite.com/anniversary_flowers/dozen_roses OR flowersite.com/dozen_roses Is it better to have the full trail of pages in the URL?
On-Page Optimization | | CKerr0 -
Choosing a title tag in seo (H1 or H2 or H3)
I look many times on google that what is the best tag to set in title for seo, H1 or H2 or H3 In many forums and sites they are asking that you need to put only H2 tag in title and someone ask to put H1 in title and i am confused, Some body tell me the correct tag for seo in google, or any other search engine.
On-Page Optimization | | seom20140 -
How do i block an entire category/directory with robots.txt?
Anyone has any idea how to block an entire product category, including all the products in that category using the robots.txt file? I'm using woocommerce in wordpress and i'd like to prevent bots from crawling every single one of products urls for now. The confusing part right now is that i have several different url structures linking to every single one of my products for example www.mystore.com/all-products, www.mystore.com/product-category, etc etc. I'm not really sure how i'd type it into the robots.txt file, or where to place the file. any help would be appreciated thanks
On-Page Optimization | | bricerhodes0 -
How much copy should there be on an e-commerce category page?
I'm not looking for a precise number, obviously. I'm more interested in a general range. More text means more long-tail and synonym opportunities, but of course you don't want too much copy above the fold, pushing your products down. Maybe you can get away with a short paragraph or two at the top of the page. You can always put more copy below the products, but in a recent SEOmoz e-commerce webinar, the presenter seemed to think that was silly and unnecessary. He even suggested that the algo might intentionally ignore text below products, since it's clearly not intended to be read. What do you think?
On-Page Optimization | | CMC-SD0
