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.
Hiding Elements on Mobile. Will this effect SEO.
-
Hey guys and gals,
I am hiding elements with @media sizes on the mobile experience for this site.
http://prepacademyschools.org/
My question is when hiding elements from mobile, will this have a negative effect on rankings for mobile and or desktop?
Right now it is a hero banner and testimonial.
My interest is because I feel responsive is now working against conversions when it comes to mobile because desktop typically has the same info several times where mobile it can be repetitive and only needed once.
Thanks,
-
Hi Judd,
If you are only hiding these elements on the mobile view, this shouldn't cause an issue from a rankings perspective. You will want to make sure that they can access your CSS file (sometimes CSS files are blocked from crawlers).
It is possible that having it hidden will mean they discount that content slightly for the mobile version, but as long as they know it's a mobile version of the desktop site they will primarily take the desktop signals into consideration when it comes to rankings (with a small boost for mobile-friendliness in the mobile SERPs).
Once the mobile-first index rolls out this will change but they have stated that with mobile-first indexing, hiding content for space reasons won't negatively impact how they weight that content, so that shouldn't affect your approach practically speaking.
-
Hi Judd,
Google will for sure notice that you are hiding elements and probably also look thoroughly into it (algorithmically) but as long as it is for the user's sake, i.e. make the user experience better on mobile and its NOT about trying to cheat (SEO wise) somehow you are pretty much on the safe side. So no problem in my opinion.
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 is the best strategy to SEO Discontinued Products on Ecommerce Sites?
RebelsMarket.com is a marketplace for alternative fashion. We have hundreds of sellers who have listed thousands of products. Over 90% of the items do not generate any sales; and about 40% of the products have been on the website for over 3+ years. We want to cleanup the catalog and remove all the old listings that older than 2years that do not generate any sales. What is the best practice for removing thousands of listings an Ecommerce site? do we 404 these products and show similar items? Your help and thoughts is much appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JimJ3 -
Is toggle Good For seo
Hi there, I have Client Who dont want to show his content to publicly, So team decided to use toggle, So Google can also See Content, But i want bu sure. Does Google will really cache that Content?? Does it down my website Ranking?? Please any one can Help, I need urgent basis Thnx in advance Falguni
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | iepl20010 -
Negative SEO Click Bot Lowering My CTR?
I am questioning whether one of our competitors is using a click bot to do negative SEO on our CTR for our industry's main term. Is there any way to detect this activity? Background: We've previously been hit by DoS attacks from this competitor, so I'm sure their ethics/morals wouldn't prevent them from doing negative SEO. We sell an insurance product that is only offered through broker networks (insurance agents) not directly by the insurance carriers themselves. However, our suspect competitor (another agency) and insurance carriers are the only ones who rank on the 1st page for our biggest term. I don't think the carrier sites would do very well since they don't even sell the product directly (they have pages w/ info only) Our site and one other agency site pops onto the bottom of page one periodically, only to be bumped back to page 2. I fear they are using a click bot that continuously bounces us out of page 1...then we do well relatively to the other pages on page 2 and naturally earn our way back to page 1, only to be pushed back to page 2 by the negative click seo...is my theory. Is there anything I can do to research whether my theory is right or if I'm just being paranoid?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheDude0 -
Asynchronous loading of product prices bad for SEO?
We are currently looking into improving our TTFB on our ecommerce site. A huge improvement would be to asynchronously load the product prices on the product list pages. The product detail page – on which the product is ordered- will be left untouched. The idea is that all content like product data, images and other static content is sent to the browser first(first byte). The product prices depend on a set of user variables like delivery location, vat inclusive/exclusive,… etc. So they would requested via an ajax call to reduce the TTFB. My question is whether google considers this as black hat SEO or not?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jef22200 -
Hiding content or links in responsive design
Hi, I found a lot of information about responsive design and SEO, mostly theories no real experiment and I'd like to find a clear answer if someone tested that. Google says:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NurunMTL
Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details For usability reasons sometimes you need to hide content or links completely (not accessible at all by the visitor) on your page for small resolutions (mobile) using CSS ("visibility:hidden" or "display:none") Is this counted as hidden content and could penalize your site or not? What do you guys do when you create responsive design websites? Thanks! GaB0 -
Do pingbacks in Wordpress help or harm SEO? Or neither?
Hey everyone, Just wondering, do pingbacks in Wordpress help or harm SEO? Or neither?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jhinchcliffe1 -
Seo style="display: none;" ?
i want to have a funktion which shortens text in categorie view in my shop. apple is doing this in their product configurator see the "learn more" button at the right side: http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MC915LL/A apple is doing this by adding dynamic content but i want it more seo type by leaving the content indexable by google. i know from a search that this was used in the past years by black had seos to cover keywordstuffing. i also read an article at google. i beleive that this is years ago and keywordstuffing is completly no option anymore. so i beleive that google just would recognise it like the way its meant to be. but if i would not be sure i would not ask here 🙂 what do you think?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kynop0 -
Ever seen a black hat SEO hack this sneaky?
A friend pointed out to me that a University site had been hacked and used to gain top Google rankings. But it was cloaked so that most users wouldn't notice the hack. Only Googlebot and visitors from Google SERPs for the spam keywords would see a hacked version. See http://www.rypmarketing.com/blog/122-how-hackers-gained-an-easy-1-google-ranking-using-a-university-website.whtml (my blog) for screenshot and specifics. I've dealt with hacks before, but nothing this evil and sneaky. Ever seen anything like this? This is not our client, but was just curious if others had seen a hack like this before.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AdamThompson0