Thanks EGOL. It is good to have an example of the accordion technique hurting traffic. This is becoming so common I'm surprised there isn't more out about it. Interestingly, Google itself uses hidden text extensively in its Chromebook site, look at the content behind the tiles further down on the How It's Different page. And I frequently see

applied to images as is done on the carousel for Isite design. Is it just that they are counting on other factors?

I'd sure like to see an exhaustive study on this. (SEOmoz, this is your cue to jump in with data already out there or to take this research on!)

I'm trying to promote the SEO perspective during a site redesign so I'm researching the impact of design requests:

• Embedding text in graphic headers and applying

  to the graphics to get the SEO value

• Reducing view-able text on a page for design reasons and by using JavaScript to hide text in accordions or tabs.

SEOmoz uses these techniques on their ranking report and most of what I read in teh forums says it is OK to hide text if your motives are pure and the text displays in a text-only browser.

But I do SEO, not SEOK. I want to optimize, not just avoid penalties.  And I try to make decisions based on data, not just anecdotes. Are there any studies out there on the effects these hidden-text topics?

How much difference DOES it make to have the text exposed? Since there is potential for spam with these techniques, why would Google give the same rank to pages with and without hidden text? When I'm balancing UX and SEO, I want to clearly define the trade-off.

What have you done when faced with this dilemma?

You (and companies burned by bad SEO practitioners everywhere) are in luck. Google recently released a tool to disavow links that are messing you up. Check out their Webmaster Central blog post, http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

Thanks EGOL. It is good to have an example of the accordion technique hurting traffic. This is becoming so common I'm surprised there isn't more out about it. Interestingly, Google itself uses hidden text extensively in its Chromebook site, look at the content behind the tiles further down on the How It's Different page. And I frequently see

applied to images as is done on the carousel for Isite design. Is it just that they are counting on other factors?

I'd sure like to see an exhaustive study on this. (SEOmoz, this is your cue to jump in with data already out there or to take this research on!)