Login to see more (some text hidden by CSS height and jquery) will it ruin SEO?
-
Hey SEO masters!
I have a website that is smashing it for SEO in Australia. In an effort to increase a user base I want to make it so only logged in users can see all the content.
So today, I launched a new feature hiding content using CSS 'height:' property. The content is obviously still there and if you were a developer you could easily 'inspect element' and remove that CSS style to see everything... There are a few other tweaks i made for logged out users, but that only affects some json.
Question: will this affect my SEO rankings?
Here is a direct example: https://www.fishingspots.com.au/s/perth if you sign up, there is about 1400words of content.
-
Hey james, thanks mate. I'm thinking of other ways to let organic traffic flow... Since the website is kind of SaaS, but more like content as a service haha.
The plan is:
- User is on the website for 1min 30secs or clicks 3 map markers or visits 3+ pages
- Popup will appear asking for a signup + payment
- If no signup: Cookie will be set for 6 months, if a users returns and cookie is detected (php) they will be redirected to sign up page
- Otherwise signup occured
(I know, web developers could inspect element and hide this stuff).
Do you think google bot be presented with this sign up stuff? And does google bot not set cookies? Will google bot be able to continue to index the site...
BTW, I hid content with css, jquery for 1 week, didn't have much of an affect at all, slight decrease in search visibility, but I was scared to leave it for too long, i managed 340 sign ups though.
-
It may be worth testing on a single page first to see how rankings are affected for your specific site and use case.
It is my understanding that any content that requires user interaction and is not visible to the user when the page loads; will be treated as though it doesn't exist for ranking purposes.
-
Thanks for the reply!
I'm well aware of the ebook tactics... it doesn't really apply here. Not sure if you looked at the site. Yes I am list building.. there is no PDF or ebook i can offer users, this website is the value adder, it is the helpful content. It has traction, 30,000+ visitors monthly and rising.
I give away details for a few fishing spots free, but the rest is sign up required. so far 17.38% conversion rate so far.
-
Thanks James, I'm testing it for a week to see how it goes. It definitely increases users...
What better ways are there to encourage / enforce user signups? Perhaps a cookie tracker of some sort? After 1000+ hours of work I consider a signup to access the content a fair trade
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
-
Blogging for SEO in Muse 2017
Can anyone give advice about SEO - specifically blogging in Wordpress and embedding it in your Muse site - that is specific to the 2017 updates. I found a lot of negative information, but that was mostly on forums from 2+ years ago. On their own forums, Muse says that you can get SEO plugins that help with this, but I am not sure I can trust those with clients yet. I have worked in Wordpress for years, but prefer the design freedom adobe provides. Specifically I am worried about whether the traffic to the site would be credited to the wordpress blog (on a different URL) or if it positively impacts my own URL used for the muse site. Would it be considered duplicate content? Also, are there any solutions that I don't know to ask about? Thanks in advance for listening.
Web Design | | Jesiwicks0 -
/index.php/ What is its purpose and does it hurt SEO?
Hello Moz Forum, I am still in the process of cleaning up the lack of attention to detail and betrayal set by our soon to be ex-SEO company. You can see a previous question I ask regarding betrayal SEO. I am analyzing every page on our website and i am noticing this /index.php/ in most of our URLs. We want to leave our expression engine cms and convert to wordpress. I have been reading about index.php but most of it is over my head for now. What does concern me is the "layman's" findings i am seeing through analytics. Our main domain has two URLs. one that ends in .com and the other ends in .com/index.php/ The one that ends in .com has a higher page rank than the ladder. And there are other internal pages with the same two variations. Can someone please explain to me what is /index.php/ ? what are the benefits of it? what are the cons? What will happen to my site once we move to wordpress? As always, your comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | CamiloSC0 -
Wordpress Blog Providing SEO to Main Site
Hi, I recently started a very much "learn on the job" SEO position, transitioning from a copywriting background. We currently have a wordpress blog up and running (and producing some decent quality content too I hope!) at example.com/blog/ and a sign up page located at example.com (sorry, can't put the address right now) for a site that is being custom built as it's got some nifty software linking to back end systems. My question is whether the content on the blog will bring SEO benefits to the main domain or whether it'll just be for the blog itself? If the latter, should we navigate the blog onto the a separate page of the main site? Thanks so much! I'm learning as much as I can as quickly as I can, but somethings still get me in a little bit of a tizzy.
Web Design | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Text in Images vs. Alt tags
Hi on my homepage i h ave multiple images They have the appropriate alt text for each image, but the text which the image displays is not written into the page and styled using CSS rather than placing text within an image. Is this a issue worth correcting, or is it sufficient to have just alt text for each image. Any major pros from having putting the text in the image into the CMS using appropriate CSS styling to achieve the same effect.
Web Design | | monster990 -
What is the best information architecture for developing local seo pages?
I think I have a good handle on the external local seo factors such as citations but I'd like to determine the best IA layout for starting a new site or adding new content to a local site. I see lots of small sites with duplicate content pages for each town/area which I know is poor practice. I also see sites that have unique content for each of those pages but it seems like bad design practice, from a user perspective, to create so many pages just for the search engines. To the example... My remodeling company needs to have some top level pages on its site to help the customers learn about my product, call these "Kitchen Remodeling" and "Bathroom Remodeling" for our purposes. Should I build these pages to be helpful to the customer without worrying too much about the SEO for now and focus on subfolders for my immediate area which would target keywords like "Kitchen Remodeling Mytown"? Aside from my future site, which is not a priority, I would like to be equipped to advise on best practices for the website development in situations where I am involved at the beginning of the process rather than just making the local SEO fit after the fact. Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | EthanB0 -
How SEO friendly (or unfriendly) this site structure is
We have a client who wants a site structure like this http://thethomasoliverband.com/home - try to scroll down on the content and see how the url of the site changes. Would there be any problems on trying to SEO this type of structure?
Web Design | | paulct0 -
Meta author. Is it relevant for website design company in its seo?
We don't usually add the meta author in the websites that we develop. I wonder if it would have any positive effect in our seo. We usually add a link in the footer like this "Diseño Web Vigo "(Website Development in Vigo). I am worry about this links. I'm not sure if they are positive because they are in the footer and so the link appears in all of the pages. Besides all these websites we develop are hosted in two different servers, and google could easily think that it is manipulative thing. What do you think? Thanks!!! 🙂
Web Design | | teconsite.com0 -
Old SEO keyword "articles", are they hurting rankings?
Hello, About two years ago, the company I work for hired an SEO firm to improve organic rankings on our site. The SEO company's primary method for doing this was producing "articles" that are not really articles but keyword stuffed pages with lots of hidden, internal links to other legitimate pages on our site. Examples: http://www.creamright.com/Isi-Chargers-articles.html http://www.creamright.com/How-To-Make-Whipped-Cream-article.html http://www.creamright.com/Cream-Whipper-articles.html Obviously, this strategy wasn't greatly successful and we cancelled our work with the firm. However, we still have all of the "articles" on the site (about 50-60 pages total) and each page is navigable from the html and XML sitemaps. Additionally, the SEO firm we used built a lot of useless links to these pages from BS directory sites which are all still active. The question I have is whether we should remove these "article" pages or should leave them alone? Although I'm sure they aren't helping any of our SEO efforts, could deleting the pages after two years negatively impact our search rankings? Thanks in advance for any help on this, Doug M.
Web Design | | Loganshark1