Hiding Text in an SEO friendly way - is it possible?
-
Hello,
I have a client who has very little (practically no) text content on his ecommerce website, on the home page and category / sub cat pages. We have drafted some text for him - but the designer has fought back against this as he feels it will break the design.
Our proposed solution is to have some text visible - and the rest will be text that is hidden but can be revealed by clicking Read More.
We are planning to follow these recommendations : http://www.shimonsandler.com/collapsible-div-seo-friendly/
We are not hiding text for the sake of it - but more to improve the UX. We of course want the text to be accessible - i.e. readable by screen readers.
Does anyone have any experience or opinions in respect to taking this course of action, and is there anything we should make sure we either do or not do to stay on the side of the BIG G?
Kind Regs,
Rich
-
This is gold dust - THANK YOU!!
-
Thanks Michael.
I agree completely. We are just trying to find a way to tick both boxes, UX and SEO - both of which, of course, are intricately connected. So an SEO friendly text reveal function seems like a good strategy all round. We are certainly not trying to hide text from users, and include it solely for SE's. I am just keen we do it in a way that is accessible and not in breach of Google's guidelines.
I usually push my opinion through and make sure there is text on the page, even if it looks ugly in a designers opinion. Because, ultimately, a site without traffic is not worth a whole lot, even if it looks amazing!
RB
-
Michael,
These are very clear steps that could be applied by many people in various situations.
You are a great leader !
Nice work!
E
-
Hi Rich,
Here you are not hiding anything for the fact. Hiding text is something else that would involve matching the color of the text with that of the background etc. Here you are just tying to make a better UX by having the Read More button that will reveal the content. The content is very much there on the same page and your intention is very clear here. Believe me my friend, Google has mastered the art of finding out the intentions of Webmasters by looking at the page and you will not have to bother about anything in this case.
Regards,
Devanur.
-
Clear and direct. The solution is change the designer.
-
Just to add to this.
A designers job is to design for content and design to make what they are creating successful.
I would start with informing the designer of the intended goals of the site. Then have a discussion around how they feel the current design they have created is accomplishing that.
If there are any holes in the design accomplishing those goals - then a discussion can take place on how strategy, content and design can come together.
The key is to help your designer understand this and lead the team to success.
If none of that works, talk to the owner and pull rank on the designer. Clients speak and think in terms of results - so make your case.
All you can do is provide thought leadership, fight for what you believe in and don't get pushed around or marginalized for common sense recommendations.
If no one wants to listen, you've just found a client not worth working for.
(But remember, it is your thought leadership and sensitivity to everyone's role that makes or breaks it, whether it be the owner, designer, developer, etc.)
Good luck!
-
:):) well said.
-
We have drafted some text for him - but the designer has fought back against this as he feels it will break the design.
I would not be able to have this person as a designer for one of my sites.
This person is not "on board" and I don't have time to pull his teeth.
Nuf said.
-
Hi Rich,
I think just this one act of hiding text will not get you in trouble however if you combine this with other black hat techniques or your site exhibits spammy behavior then you're definitely in trouble. If one is able to access all the content in a text only browser then you should be ok. I would still try and educate the client on having a small block of introductory text above the product and category pages that would also help with conversions.
Her's the official link on hidden text by Google.
Jill Whalen's forum addresses this question here
Here's another link on this topic
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
-
Shall I hide short product review texts from customers (to avoid google panda/quality issues)?
About 30% of product reviews that the clients of our ecommerce store submitted in the last 10 years are 3 words or less (we did not require any minimum length). Would you recommend to hide those very short review texts? Where to draw the limit?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Numeric star rating would still go into our accumulated product rating. My only concern here is what impact it may have on google ranking.
To give some context, the site has for a long time some panda/phantom related issues where there are no obvious reasons that we could point to.0 -
Looking for Adult SEO company
Hi guys and girls, I am looking for a company that is willing to work with us to improve our SEO. Our website is www.reallovesexdolls.com and we keep on going all the way UP to fall rock bottom hard again (like waves in the ocean). It's really weird, we never invested much in link building and such. We are so busy with other things that it would be nice to outsource this task. You can contact us by phone, or by email. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MartinePeters0 -
Social Impacts on SEO? How to Do this?
I'm new in SEO and heard by one of my friend that social signals are important for SEO of a website. If people have shared a website's url on their twitter, then it will automatically get rank in google. Is that true and how google sees this social sharing? and how can I do this for my website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hammadrafique0 -
Favorite SEO firm you would recommend
Is there a favorite SEO firm that you would recommend. Is there any site that ranks the top firms in the country?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | movieguide0 -
Best way to set up anchor text on parked pages?
Our company is no longer offering a series of products, much to the disappointment of our SEO team since we've spent a long time building up the pages and getting them ranked organically. The pages all have decent page rank and in some cases rank #1 for the primary keyword. We have a sister company that we acquired a year ago and they still offer these products on their website. They are a completely separate company with their own website which existed long before we acquired them and we have nothing to do with their website. Our team has proposed that rather than take down the URLs on our site for the products we no longer offer, to put a message saying something like "sorry we don't offer this anymore but you may be interested in this.." and then link to our sister company with anchor text so that they can get some benefit from our SEO efforts if we can't. The question/issue is how should we do that since there will be a lot of pages from the same domain, about 20 pages, all linking to a few pages on a different domain. Should the anchor text be varied unbranded or branded? On the one hand I think if we change up the anchor text used to link to another page many times from a single domain that looks strange and transparent to google. On the other hand unbranded text would be the better descriptor for users since we are deep linking to the product not the homepage of the other site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edu-SEO0 -
Anchor Text Usage
Hi, I have used anchor text more heavily. I built over 80 links so far, all are quality links like press releases & social bookmarks. I used to be ranking on #7 page for my keywords, then all of sudden i am not even on 50th page. Is this is because of Anchor text usage? Now should i remove those links or dilute my anchor texts by getting more links with different anchor texts. This is because the keyword i am targetting is pretty tough. So i think 80 links is not good enough. Let me know your thoughts. Here is the screenshot of the links i got so far which i think valuable. And the rest are social bookmarks. http://screencast.com/t/TJiDOanxnfZ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegitt0 -
How to Hide Directories in Search?
I noticed bad 404 error links in Google Webmaster Tools and they were pointing to directories that do not have an actual page, but hold information. Ex: there are links pointing to our PDF folder which holds all of our pdf documents. If i type in , example.com/pdf/ it brings up a unformated webpage that displays all of our PDF links. How do I prevent this from happening. Right now I am blocking these in my robots.txt file, but if i type them in, they still appear. Or should I not worry about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hfranz0 -
Whitelabel stores and consequences for SEO
Hello I have a very important question to you. We are planning to a open 2 – 5 “whitelabel” web shops in each country that run on the same platform and server (Demandware) as our current web sites. Each white label site will have own domain. The product selection will be identical and prices will be identical, but the sites will be branded differently with other logo and colors and name for the store. The question is about the consequences for SEO for such project. What are the risks for the rankings for us, if the whitelabel products have same product descriptions and names as our existing web shop has? Will it affect our rankings? How would google rank 3 whitelabel stores that have own domains but otherwise identical product content? What is the minimal that should be changed from SEO point of view in order to avoid Google penalties or ranking problems? Looking forward to hear from you Greetings,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EuropeanSEOguy
Rolf0