Content Below the Fold
-
Hi
I wondered what the view is on content below the fold?
We have the H1, product listings & then some written content under the products - will Google just ignore this?
I can't hide it under a tab or put a lot of content above products - so I'm not sure what the other option is?
Thank you
-
Hi Becky,
Here is what I found:
The pros and cons of hiding content using JavaScript and CSS (display: none) has been a topic of some debate within the SEO industry, and Google’s comments over time have somewhat added to the confusion.
- **November 2014 **– Google’s John Mueller stated that Google _“may not” _index or rank hidden content. In aGoogle+ Hangout the following month, John repeated this, stating that hidden content would be _“discounted”_and has been for a number of years
- **21 July 2015 **– Google’s Gary Illyes, contributing to a Stack Overflow forum thread , provided clarification of this by stating that this type of content is given “way less weight in ranking”
- **27 July 2015 **– In a separate Stack Overflow thread on the same topic, Gary Illyes again confirmed that _“[Google] will index that but the content’s weight will be lower since it’s hidden” _
So the content will still be indexed, but deemed less important by the crawlers.
-
Yeh it's disappointing.
I've tried having some content behind a tab and some under the products and I am not seeing either one as having much of an effect.
Unless I remove it altogether, I'm not sure what else I can do with it?
-
Hi
Yes I tried different pages and it's still the same. I think it's to do with things we have blocked in robots.txt...
-
I'm not seeing a problem in my GoogleBot simulators, Becky, but the one within your Google Search Console is still the best judge. Have you tried reloading the Fetch as... a couple of times? And tried it on different pages?
-
Yup - Google still says content that can only be seen after a user interaction is given less importance. Kinda stupid, given that things like tabs/accordians are a major usability enhancement, but that's still where we are.
P.
-
Hi
So I did fetch as Google - and I'm seeing the page quite differently if I'm Googlebot vs. visitors.
It just sees a few big images, I can't see it rendering any product listings or content - do I now have a bigger problem?
Thank you
-
Hi
Thank you for the replies. I don't want to hide it, I just can't have it pushing products down the page so they can't be seen..
I thought in Google webmaster guidelines they included a comment to say they will ignore content behind tabs?
Becky
-
Any content below the fold will still be read. Are you trying to hide it but still get the SEO value? If that's the case, I would create a collapsible tab to keep the content on the page but hidden. If you want it to be visible, leave it as is and don't worry about Google not reading it—it will be read.
-
While theoretically logical, Google's own John Mueller stated last week that code to text ratio has absolutely no effect on crawling of a site, and in a followup question, he directly told me text/code ratio has no effect as a ranking factor either.
These used to be very minor considerations back when the search engine crawlers weren't as powerful, but no longer.
Fully agree with Pia that the idea of "above the fold" influencing ranking is nonsense as well. Given that the sweet spot for consistently high-ranking pages is ~2200 words, the idea that only the first paragraph or two are more important is unsupportable.
Hope that helps?
Paul
-
Additionally, do check the content using Fetch as google in Google Search Console / Webmaster tools. It would really help you see how spiders see the content compared to users. This is an important aspect of SEO which a lot of people ignore, you are looking to find that whether the spiders see a structured view of the content and not messy. I hope this helps, if you have further questions, please feel free to ask. Regards, Vijay
-
There's no manipulation whatsoever. In fact, Google encourage website developers and SEOs to optimise/tidy their code and keep a good code-to-content ratio. This is why Google gives us so many tools in order to do so. It makes our sites easier to crawl for Google, and in return Google may even like us more for it!
Just found an article that sums it up quite nicely:
"Essentially what is being stated is a fairly logical conclusion: reduce the amount of code on your page and the content (you know, the place where your keywords are) takes a higher priority. Additionally compliance will, by necessity, make your site easy to crawl and, additionally, allow you greater control over which portions of your content are given more weight by the search engines. The thinking behind validating code for SEO benefits is that, once you have a compliant site, not only will your site be a better user experience on a much larger number of browsers, but you’ll have a site with far less code, that will rank higher on the search engines because of it."
- http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/official-google-prefers-valid-html-css/
But going back to your original post, "above-the-fold is dead", yadda yadda... So long as your content in the source is metaphorically "above the fold" and not drowning in heavy code, on the page itself just worry about giving your users the "experience" that they're looking for. And not how many pixels from the top of the browser your content is. Hope that makes more sense!
-
Great thank you, you read so many conflicting articles that it's difficult to know.
I'll see if we can look at our code, but I'd want to be mindful of not manipulating Google.
Thank you!
-
I feel prioritising elements to be "above the fold" is a bit of an outdated concept these days.
Where is the fold? Different devices and screen resolutions will have different folds, and more websites are being designed now to make the traditional "above the fold" section more visually interesting and designed for user experience, rather than packed full of content.
The higher the content is in the source code itself, the more weight it will have on the page. This doesn't necessarily translate to the "visually higher the content is on the page". Google is going to be reading from top to bottom of your code, so naturally you want the most important content/links to be found first. As long as you meet (or exceed!) the user's expectation of the content upon arrival, and you keep the code tidy in terms of how much Google has to read before it gets to the real valuable content, I doubt Google's going to worry about whether users have to scroll a little to get to it.
-
Hi Becky,
As far as i understand Google will not ignore however Google do treat some part of the page as more important than other. For instance, if you have written a description of the product and some of the description is been hide.
Google, will take that as the important piece of content been displayed for user and least important been hide.
I do not see any point for Google to ignore the fold one. -
Content below the fold is still read, however less value is placed on it. So it is still worth having content that is produced for below the fold as it will still help that page rank.
Show the user what they want to see when they land on the page, majority of the time in doing this you will actually show Google what they need to rank you.
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
-
Duplicate content across domains?
Does anyone have suggestions for managing duplicate product/solution website content across domains? (specifically parent/child company domains) Is it advisable to do this? Will it hurt either domain? Any best practices when going down this path?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pilgrimquality0 -
Tabbed Content Revisited
Hi-diddly-ho SEO gurus, quick question. I just saw this article and wanted to get thoughts from the people here. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-says-now-ok-put-content-behind-tabs/178020/ I am constantly at war with our UX guy on this subject because he believes, along with our CEO, that tabbed and accordion style information is better from THE UX standpoint. Less clutter on a page but with information still readily available. I am not here to argue that point but was wondering if you agree with the article posted here. I had to inform them their roll needed to be slowed until I could get something a little more concrete on the matter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spadedesign0 -
Duplicate Content For Product Alternative listing
Hi I have a tricky one here. cloudswave is a directory of products and we are launching new pages called Alternatives to Product X This page displays 10 products that are an alternative to product X (Page A) Lets say now you want to have the alternatives to a similar product within the same industry, product Y (Page B), you will have 10 product alternatives, but this page will be almost identical to Page A as the products are in similar and in the same industry. Maybe one to two products will differ in the 2 listings. Now even SEO tags are different, aren't those two pages considered duplicate content? What are your suggestions to avoid this problem? thank you guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RSedrati0 -
On Page Content. has a H2 Tag but should I also use H3 tags for the sub headings within this body of content
Hi Mozzers, My on page content comes under my H2 tag. I have a few subheadings within my content to help break it up etc and currently this is just underlined (not bold or anything) and I am wondering from an SEO perspective, should I be making these sub headings H3 tags. Otherwise , I just have 500-750 words of content under an H2 tag which is what I am currently doing on my landing pages. thanks pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Unique Content Below Fold - Better Move Above Fold?
I have a page with a Google Map taking up 80% of space above the fold (rest is content which is not unique to my site) and all unique written content and copyrighted pictures are from a visual stand point right below the fold. I am considering making the Google map 1/4 in size so I can get my unique content up higher. Questions: Do we have any evidence or sound reasoning why I should / should not make this move? Is the content really considered below the fold or will Google see that it is simply a large map I have on the site and therefore will actually consider the content to be above the fold? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Duplicate Content... Really?
Hi all, My site is www.actronics.eu Moz reports virtually every product page as duplicate content, flagged as HIGH PRIORITY!. I know why. Moz classes a page as duplicate if >95% content/code similar. There's very little I can do about this as although our products are different, the content is very similar, albeit a few part numbers and vehicle make/model. Here's an example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowoody
http://www.actronics.eu/en/shop/audi-a4-8d-b5-1994-2000-abs-ecu-en/bosch-5-3
http://www.actronics.eu/en/shop/bmw-3-series-e36-1990-1998-abs-ecu-en/ate-34-51 Now, multiply this by ~2,000 products X 7 different languages and you'll see we have a big dupe content issue (according to Moz's Crawl Diagnostics report). I say "according to Moz..." as I do not know if this is actually an issue for Google? 90% of our products pages rank, albeit some much better than others? So what is the solution? We're not trying to deceive Google in any way so it would seem unfair to be hit with a dupe content penalty, this is a legit dilemma where our product differ by as little as a part number. One ugly solution would be to remove header / sidebar / footer on our product pages as I've demonstrated here - http://woodberry.me.uk/test-page2-minimal-v2.html since this removes A LOT of page bloat (code) and would bring the page difference down to 80% duplicate.
(This is the tool I'm using for checking http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php) Other "prettier" solutions would greatly appreciated. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks,
Woody 🙂1 -
Stolen website content
Hello, recently we had a lot of content written for our new website. Unfortunately me and my partner have went separate ways, and he has used all my unique content on his own website. All our product descriptions, about us etc, he simply changed the name of the company. He has agreed to take the content down, so that i can now put this content on our new website which is currently being designed. Will google see this as duplicate content as it has been on a website before? Even though the content has been removed from the original website. I was worried as the content is no longer "fresh" so to speak. Can any one help me with this,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
SEO Tools for Content Audit
Hi i'm looking for a tool which can do a full content audit for a site for instance - Find pages which: • Lack text content. • Finds pages with lengthy meta descriptions • Finds missing H1 tags or multiple H1 tags . • Duplicate meta descriptions. • Find images with no alt text Are there any tools besides the ones on SEMOZ which can enable me to do a full content audit on factors like these. Or any SEO audit tools out there which you can recommend. Cheers, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990