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
-
What to do with dynamically translated content sharing same urls?
We've just added to an originally English website, Italian and German translations. User can switch between them with right hand drop down language selection menu; then the entire page will be translated (including menu, body, footer) but the urls remain the same. The Italian page have some meta data (titles and descriptions) translated as well. Is it going to be a significantly negative effect on SEO to have the translated pages sharing the same urls?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | D2i0 -
How do I optimize dynamic content for SEO?
Hello, folks! I'm wondering how I optimize a site if it is built on a platform that works based on dynamic content. For example, the page pulls in certain information based on the information it has about the user. Not every user will see the same page. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Geonetric
Lindsey0 -
What is the fastest way to deindex content from Google?
Yesterday we had a client discover that our staging URLs were being indexed in Google. This was due to a technical oversight from our development team (forgot to upload meta robots tags). We are trying to remove this content as quickly as possible. Are there any methods in the Google Search Console to expedite this process? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Is tabbed content bad for SEO?
I work for a Theater show listings and ticketing website. In our show listings pages (e.g. http://www.theatermania.com/broadway/this-is-our-youth_302998/) we split our content into separate tabs (overview, pricing and show dates, cast, and video). Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by separating the content? Are we better served with keeping it all in a single page? Thanks so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Moving some content to a new domain - best practices to avoid duplicate content?
Hi We are setting up a new domain to focus on a specific product and want to use some of the content from the original domain on the new site and remove it from the original. The content is appropriate for the new domain and will be irrelevant for the original domain and we want to avoid creating completely new content. There will be a link between the two domains. What is the best practice for this to avoid duplicate content and a potential Panda penalty?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Citybase0 -
Duplicate content mess
One website I'm working with keeps a HTML archive of content from various magazines they publish. Some articles were repeated across different magazines, sometimes up to 5 times. These articles were also used as content elsewhere on the same website, resulting in up to 10 duplicates of the same article on one website. With regards to the 5 that are duplicates but not contained in the magazine, I can delete (resulting in 404) all but the highest value of each (most don't have any external links). There are hundreds of occurrences of this and it seems unfeasible to 301 or noindex them. After seeing how their system works I can canonical the remaining duplicate that isn't contained in the magazine to the corresponding original magazine version - but I can't canonical any of the other versions in the magazines to the original. I can't delete the other duplicates as they're part of the content of a particular issue of a magazine. The best thing I can think of doing is adding a link in the magazine duplicates to the original article, something along the lines of "This article originally appeared in...", though I get the impression the client wouldn't want to reveal that they used to share so much content across different magazines. The duplicate pages across the different magazines do differ slightly as a result of the different Contents menu for each magazine. Do you think it's a case of what I'm doing will be better than how it was, or is there something further I can do? Is adding the links enough? Thanks. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Duplicate content even with 301 redirects
I know this isn't a developer forum but I figure someone will know the answer to this. My site is http://www.stadriemblems.com and I have a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file to redirect all non-www to www and it works great. But SEOmoz seems to think this doesn't apply to my blog, which is located at http://www.stadriemblems.com/blog It doesn't seem to make sense that I'd need to place code in every .htaccess file of every sub-folder. If I do, what code can I use? The weirdest part about this is that the redirecting works just fine; it's just SEOmoz's crawler that doesn't seem to be with the program here. Does this happen to you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
I have a duplicate content problem
The website guy that made the website for my business Premier Martial Arts Austin disappeared and didn't set up that www. was to begin each URL, so I now have a duplicate content problem and don't want to be penalized for it. I tried to show in Webmaster tools the preferred setup but can't get it to OK that I'm the website owner. Any idea as what to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OhYeahSteve0