Drupal SEO - Concerns about cloaking
-
It appears that core Drupal includes a CSS style that automatically generates an
tag for any* or
> ## Main menu This uses the CSS to create a 1px1px header with that text that is absolutely positioned in the top left hand corner. Essentially, hidden and unreadable to humans and presumably also useless to even screen readers. There is some discussion of the reasoning for including this functionality as standard here: [http://drupal.org/node/1392510](http://drupal.org/node/1392510 "http://drupal.org/node/1392510") I'm not convinced of its use/validity/helpfulness from an SEO perspective so there's a few questions that arise out of this. 1. Is there a valid non-SEO reason for leaving this as the default rather than giving ourselves full control over our ## tags? 2. Could this be seen as cloaking by creating hidden/invisible elements that are used by the search engines as ranking factors? Update: http://www.seobythesea.com/2013/03/google-invisible-text-hidden-links/ Google's latest patent appears to deal with this topic. The patent document even makes explicit reference to the practice of hiding text in ## tags that are invisible to users and are not proper headings. Anyone have any thoughts on what SEOs using Drupal should be doing about this?
-
Thanks Mike.
We're going to run with it for a while on one of our sites and see how it performs. I'll try and post any meaningful results here at a later date.
-
I was really concerned when I started developing in Drupal 7 and noticed that many themes had this programmed in.
Although I have not performed any specific split test on taking this out I had not noticed any misfortunes or penalties by having it in the template as you have stated. I also crawl my sites many times over with different tools and I have not received warnings etc.
Nonetheless I moved over to the Omega Theme, which is responsive, and the semantic programming is much better for my taste.
-
Thanks Corey.
It's certainly something that had us a bit worried.
The maximum number of hidden H2s on our Drupal pages is something like 2-3, and in each case the H2 serves to provide a description for the following ul/ol HTML tags (which it can be argued is just good semantic markup). If this is the case, could it still be penalised for cloaking? Essentially, is cloaking seen as an absolute practice in the eyes of the Search Engines or is it more subjective? Is a site penalised for appearing to use cloaking methods in a black and white sense and in lines with certain criteria or do they rate this by degrees?
(I realise they are questions we might not be in a position to know the answer to.)
I'm still in two minds about seemingly wasting 2-3 H tags by having them wrap around "main menu" content on seemingly every page. As it stands, they are automatically generated around our breadcrumb and our main menu buttons at the top of the page and are used to simply describe the menus on the page.
My worry is that even if this is not having a negative impact re: cloaking it is still a waste of H2 tags. If we have these 2-3 just describing the menus (that are global) and a further 1-2 describing the actual content of the page, then this is not really ideal from an SEO point of view.
In our case, I wonder if it might be worth sacrificing semantic structure for the SEO benefit?
Thanks.
-
These topics are always a little subjective, but here's what I'm seeing.
1. Screen readers (used by the blind) do like 'H tags'. And Google does give preference to sites better that are more likely to be handicap accessible. From what I see, this isn't an ideal use though. For example, if you can end up with 200 x H2 tags on a page, I'd say this is wrong.
Keywords placed in 'H tags' are also given more weight in a page's ranking. So, if the # of H tags is abused, and your page provides near nothing but H2's, it's not unreasonable to suspect that Google thinks you're stuffing keywords into the second-most powerful tag that can go into . It seems that Google does more to go after these kinds of possibly manipulative practices than they do to award the positive: far more often people shoot themselves in the foot. And this seems to, at very least, make that a lot easier to do. A page should generally have a single H1 at the start, and a small handful of relevant headings marked H2 - H6.
2. I'd again be a little wary. Text in the source that's not visible to the user is the definition of cloaking. As AJAX has gotten more popular, you do see more prestigious sites hiding content with JavaScript, and very slowly (that is, much slower than mainstream development), Google seems to adapt to these kinds of evolutions. But hiding everything by default in a CSS class? I'd personally avoid that, and if I saw it on a client's site, it would sit high on my list of things to tweak and test.
Hope something solid gets sorted, and then extensively A/B tested in production. Drupal is a good application; it still blows my mind that people still need to write SEO plugins / hacks for literally every application out there. It gives us SEO's a little more job security that these technical problems are almost never fully tackled at the source.
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
-
I need help with international SEO for two sites?
I'll try to keep this clear... I am working with an company based in Germany, they own company.com/de and company.com/en, and that's how they are currently structuring their domains. They also own companyusa.com that they really want to show up in USA only. They want to keep company.com/en for England/english speaking Europe and company.com/de for their German audience in Germany. They are wanting us to optimize/SEO for companyusa.com, and they want that URL to show up as the top google search in the USA for their "company" keyword. What is showing up now is www.company.com/en 1st in Google because it's been around longer and it has more domain authority. What is the best practice for us optimize companyusa.com so that it is the top dog in the USA while not messing up the other domains? Should we merge? Subfolders all around? Thanks for all the input.
Web Design | | Rocket.Fuel0 -
Just How Bad is Adobe MUSE for SEO?
Adobe's new website builder "Adobe Muse" has a reputation for creating terrible code. I want to know if anyone has experience with the software and what your opinion is on just how bad the code really is for SEO. I'm currently using "Weebly", which is a similar, but more basic website building software. My results for SEO have been going well using that software, however it's limited in terms of building an aesthetically pleasing website design. On the other hand, you can build gorgeous websites with Adobe Muse, but I don't want to use it if it's going to prevent me from ranking. What are your thoughts?
Web Design | | Alchemist230 -
Wordpress/ Insert Tables/ SEO
I'm using Wordpress to create websites and blogs. I have limited (non-existent) HTML Coding knowledge. I'm looking to insert tables within my pages with information. Inside of these tables I want certain names to link to another page with more specific information about that name. I'm using a plugin called "WP Tables Reloaded" it simple helps you to create aesthetically pleasing tables without needing to know HTML Code or CSS. The issue is... when you create this table and insert it to the post, the only thing that shows on the sites back-end page is the table I.D. and the only thing that shows in the HTML is the tables I.D. It looks like this... [table id=2 /] I don't think search engines will be able to crawl this table, thus I won't be receiving any credit for the links being used within the table. Am I right about this?
Web Design | | AndySolo0 -
To many scripts in my homepage. This is a problem in SEO?
I adding a lot of new features to my website: JS animated, menus, google translate, alexa counter, google analytics, salesforce, and so on. My website is full of scripts and im worry about the SEO. Is that an issue?
Web Design | | Naghirniac0 -
What can this charity site do to improve SEO?
Hello wise ones, We have been working with the charity Volunteers of America to create a new site for their car donation program at carshelpingpeople.org They are a national charity with extensive local programs run by regional affiliates, so the site is divided into a small national section linked to Regional Affiliate sections. You get to the regional sections either by entering your zip code or clicking on your state in the bottom nav of the national pages. Right now we have developed regional sections for Michigan, Nevada, Maryland, Washington D.C., New Jersey, Delaware and the Philadelphia area. The site is about 2 1/2 months old, and while our conversion rate is pretty good (7%) our organic search ranking isn't improving as quickly as we'd like to see. Car donation is a very competitive space, and we would appreciate any advice on how to improve the SEO of the site. Thanks so much.
Web Design | | Phibnax0 -
URL question for SEO...
I'm thinking of creating a new url off an existing url and was wondering if there would be any impact. For example I have the URL www.baseball.com and rather than secure a new url for a new product launch such as www.newbaseballproduct.com I want to do newproduct.baseball.com Will this hurt my SEO rankings for this new site? Basically wanting to figure out if this will hurt me or not? Should I get a new url or re-utilize an existing URL... really for a landing page/micro site, etc.,
Web Design | | gritacco0 -
Which Shopping Cart is best for SEO? Magento vs. X-Cart
Comparing X-Cart and Magento, which do you think is better for SEO and why? I am leaning towards Magento and wanted to get some opinions?
Web Design | | BlinkWeb0 -
How do you deal with lack of understanding about SEO?
Since I subcontract out to web design people or work doing SEO for small businesses, I am wondering how others (and if others) deal with non-compliance with good SEO practices. For instance, I had a web designer change a few of the terms for a website because the client wanted another term they thought was better instead of sticking to the SEO they contracted for and she diluted the site architecture in the process. A former small business client called for some changes and I discovered she had made some changes she "thought were good terms." Do you encounter such issues, and if so, how do you deal with them--or do you just oblige the request? Also, I've been getting requests to do "partial" seo instead of entire sites. Is that ever a good idea and if so, how would you handle it? If not, how do you successfully dissuade a client from doing so? (Both small biz and web design peeps)
Web Design | | TheARKlady0