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.
Google and responsive content in display:none CSS
-
I’m building a WordPress site with Visual Composer and I’ve hit a point where I need to show a totally different section on a mobile compared to a desktop/tablet.
My issue/question comes from the fact that both mobile and desktop rows will have the same content as well as H1/H2/H3 tags.
From inspecting the elements I see the mobile only rows are hidden until the page size shrinks through being set to 'display: none' in the CSS (standard visual composer way of handling width & responsiveness)
How will Google see this in terms of SEO? I don’t want to come across as if I’m cloaking text and H1 tags on the page
(I have emailed the visual composer support but wanted to get an external opinion)
-
Hi Ashley,
To clarify, this is just a section of the page, right? The page will still have essentially the same information for both mobile and desktop users, but tailored to their devices? It's fine to remove or change up inconsequential elements of the page. Webmasters have had to do this from the start, for ads, complicated navigation, and other page elements that are helpful on a desktop page but cluttered on a phone screen.
If this content is the majority of the page, though, and sends a different message, you should probably create a separate page for mobile visitors. If this is the case, let me know and I can follow up with more specific recommendations.
Good luck!
Kristina
-
There's nothing wrong with hidden elements as long as they serve some purpose other than to game Google. A hidden div with tons of content that will never be seen by a end user is spam. A hidden div that requires you to click on something to see it is not spam.
Matt Cutts talked about the issue a couple of years ago
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
-
Collapsible sections - content
**Hi,****I am looking to improve the aesthetics of some pages on my website by adding written content into collapsible tabs. I was wondering whether the content that is ‘hidden’ by tabs is given less weight by Google from the perspective of SEO? **Some articles I have read suggest that tabbed content is weighted equally with the content which is already immediately visible to the user, but others suggest that this may not be the case. **Please, can I request opinions on the matter? Any advice would be greatly appreciated, many thanks.**Katarina
Technical SEO | Nov 17, 2019, 9:08 PM | Katarina-Borovska0 -
Not all images indexed in Google
Hi all, Recently, got an unusual issue with images in Google index. We have more than 1,500 images in our sitemap, but according to Search Console only 273 of those are indexed. If I check Google image search directly, I find more images in index, but still not all of them. For example this post has 28 images and only 17 are indexed in Google image. This is happening to other posts as well. Checked all possible reasons (missing alt, image as background, file size, fetch and render in Search Console), but none of these are relevant in our case. So, everything looks fine, but not all images are in index. Any ideas on this issue? Your feedback is much appreciated, thanks
Technical SEO | Aug 24, 2018, 1:31 PM | flo_seo1 -
Content in Accordion doesn't rank as well as Content in Text box?
Does content rank better in a full view text layout, rather than in a clickable accordion? I read somewhere because users need to click into an accordion it may not rank as well, as it may be considered hidden on the page - is this true? accordion example: see features: https://www.workday.com/en-us/applications/student.html
Technical SEO | Aug 24, 2017, 2:52 PM | DigitalCRO1 -
How does Google treat Content hidden in click-to-expand tabs?
Hi Peeps I'm working a web build project and having some debates going on with our UX and SEO department regards hidden content in click-to-expand tabs. The UX team is suggesting using these tabs is a legitimate method of making large amounts of copy more easily digestible to readers. The tabs are for FAQs ( hopefully, you can view the wireframe URL ) and the SEO team are concerned that the content in these tabs contains some core keyword phrases which may not be indexed. I am the project lead on this and honestly can't claim to be an expert on either discipline so any advice would be very welcome. Can search engines index content hidden in these tabs? Thank you in advance for any advice shared. Nicky 213985904
Technical SEO | Feb 6, 2017, 7:57 PM | nickspiteri0 -
Z-indexed content
I have some content on a page that I am not using any type of css hiding techniques, but I am using an image with a higher z-index in order to prevent the text from being seen until a user clicks a link to have the content scroll down. Are there any negative repercussions for doing this in regards to SEO?
Technical SEO | Sep 11, 2015, 3:32 PM | cokergroup0 -
Is Google suppressing a page from results - if so why?
UPDATE: It seems the issue was that pages were accessible via multiple URLs (i.e. with and without trailing slash, with and without .aspx extension). Once this issue was resolved, pages started ranking again. Our website used to rank well for a keyword (top 5), though this was over a year ago now. Since then the page no longer ranks at all, but sub pages of that page rank around 40th-60th. I searched for our site and the term on Google (i.e. 'Keyword site:MySite.com') and increased the number of results to 100, again the page isn't in the results. However when I just search for our site (site:MySite.com) then the page is there, appearing higher up the results than the sub pages. I thought this may be down to keyword stuffing; there were around 20-30 instances of the keyword on the page, however roughly the same quantity of keywords were on each sub pages as well. I've now removed some of the excess keywords from all sections as it was getting in the way of usability as well, but I just wanted some thoughts on whether this is a likely cause or if there is something else I should be worried about.
Technical SEO | Jul 1, 2014, 8:41 AM | Datel1 -
Pages removed from Google index?
Hi All, I had around 2,300 pages in the google index until a week ago. The index removed a load and left me with 152 submitted, 152 indexed? I have just re-submitted my sitemap and will wait to see what happens. Any idea why it has done this? I have seen a drop in my rankings since. Thanks
Technical SEO | Mar 25, 2013, 5:36 PM | TomLondon0 -
Google Off/On Tags
I came across this article about telling google not to crawl a portion of a webpage, but I never hear anyone in the SEO community talk about them. http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/08/23/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/ Does anyone use these and find them to be effective? If not, how do you suggest noindexing/canonicalizing a portion of a page to avoid duplicate content that shows up on multiple pages?
Technical SEO | Oct 28, 2011, 12:32 PM | Hakkasan1