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 -
Image scale Error On page seo
I Have an Image Scale Error in Gtmetrix how to solve it which is the best way to solve it I tried many ways but it's not working.
On-Page Optimization | | AlexSmithh0 -
Should I change our main category pages to product listing pages?
With the thought of improving user experience, as well as rankings in Google, I'm considering changing our main category pages to product listing pages (with sub-categories remaining, still). These main category pages are very standard and don't link to any informational content, such as buyers guides, etc. What's driven this is the latest Google core update. I've noticed our main competitor (who we were out-ranking before... but not now) now uses this approach. I can see the benefit from a user perspective, i.e. less clicks to reach products. What's the pros/cons from an SEO point of view, please? Could the potential duplication of content be an issue? For context, we have about 2,000 products and website is on Magento 2.
On-Page Optimization | | alifeofjoy1 -
Best SEO experts you know in India Chennai
Best SEO experts you know in India Chennai. Does anyone know of few companies who deal with SEO to help optimize keywords? and get more traffic for our website? thank you
On-Page Optimization | | bsharath0 -
Maximum page size for better seo results?
Does really page size affect the results in search engines? And, what is the maximum in this case?
On-Page Optimization | | Eslam-yosef0 -
SEO for Image only posts
Let's say I have a post where I show 25 different wood textures. I start the post with a small paragraph and then I show several images of wood textures linked to an internal or external page. Since I don't use a text link, then I have to rely on alt tags. It would be very difficult to assign a different alt tag to so many similar images, and I guess there would be a risk of keyword stuffing (walnut wood, oak wood, etc). On the other side, if I assign the same tag to all images, then that clearly is keyword stuffing (alt=wood textures). This is just an example, but it applies to most of my posts. What do you think I should do with the alt tags? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | enriquef0 -
What's the best way to name an image for SEO?
Hi Guys,
On-Page Optimization | | krseo
I'm thinking about images and SEO. What's the best way for naming and using images in HTML Code? For example: Image-Name: keyword-keyword2-keyword3.jpg or keywordkeyword2keyword3.jpg ?
How many Keywords should I use max for a picture? And also do you use the alt tag as description of the image and the title tag or only the alt tag? If you use the title, what do you use it for? Maybe someone can copy a HTML-Code example for me 😉 Thank you 🙂
Alex0 -
Optimizing Wordpress Categories
I’m trying to optimize the category links in the wordpress blog http://blog.reputationforward.com. I’m in the process of installing the Yeost SEO plugin and am going to revise the Category Title Tags, Meta Descriptions and slugs. I’m also in the process of using Tags so that I can get the posts that appear in a category to be specific to that category (currently the publisher is listing posts in multiple categories: See “Business Management Category”). But other than that, is there anything else I can do to optimize each category?
On-Page Optimization | | EricVallee341