Content Below the Fold
-
Hi
I wondered what the view is on content below the fold?
We have the H1, product listings & then some written content under the products - will Google just ignore this?
I can't hide it under a tab or put a lot of content above products - so I'm not sure what the other option is?
Thank you
-
Hi Becky,
Here is what I found:
The pros and cons of hiding content using JavaScript and CSS (display: none) has been a topic of some debate within the SEO industry, and Google’s comments over time have somewhat added to the confusion.
- **November 2014 **– Google’s John Mueller stated that Google _“may not” _index or rank hidden content. In aGoogle+ Hangout the following month, John repeated this, stating that hidden content would be _“discounted”_and has been for a number of years
- **21 July 2015 **– Google’s Gary Illyes, contributing to a Stack Overflow forum thread , provided clarification of this by stating that this type of content is given “way less weight in ranking”
- **27 July 2015 **– In a separate Stack Overflow thread on the same topic, Gary Illyes again confirmed that _“[Google] will index that but the content’s weight will be lower since it’s hidden” _
So the content will still be indexed, but deemed less important by the crawlers.
-
Yeh it's disappointing.
I've tried having some content behind a tab and some under the products and I am not seeing either one as having much of an effect.
Unless I remove it altogether, I'm not sure what else I can do with it?
-
Hi
Yes I tried different pages and it's still the same. I think it's to do with things we have blocked in robots.txt...
-
I'm not seeing a problem in my GoogleBot simulators, Becky, but the one within your Google Search Console is still the best judge. Have you tried reloading the Fetch as... a couple of times? And tried it on different pages?
-
Yup - Google still says content that can only be seen after a user interaction is given less importance. Kinda stupid, given that things like tabs/accordians are a major usability enhancement, but that's still where we are.
P.
-
Hi
So I did fetch as Google - and I'm seeing the page quite differently if I'm Googlebot vs. visitors.
It just sees a few big images, I can't see it rendering any product listings or content - do I now have a bigger problem?
Thank you
-
Hi
Thank you for the replies. I don't want to hide it, I just can't have it pushing products down the page so they can't be seen..
I thought in Google webmaster guidelines they included a comment to say they will ignore content behind tabs?
Becky
-
Any content below the fold will still be read. Are you trying to hide it but still get the SEO value? If that's the case, I would create a collapsible tab to keep the content on the page but hidden. If you want it to be visible, leave it as is and don't worry about Google not reading it—it will be read.
-
While theoretically logical, Google's own John Mueller stated last week that code to text ratio has absolutely no effect on crawling of a site, and in a followup question, he directly told me text/code ratio has no effect as a ranking factor either.
These used to be very minor considerations back when the search engine crawlers weren't as powerful, but no longer.
Fully agree with Pia that the idea of "above the fold" influencing ranking is nonsense as well. Given that the sweet spot for consistently high-ranking pages is ~2200 words, the idea that only the first paragraph or two are more important is unsupportable.
Hope that helps?
Paul
-
Additionally, do check the content using Fetch as google in Google Search Console / Webmaster tools. It would really help you see how spiders see the content compared to users. This is an important aspect of SEO which a lot of people ignore, you are looking to find that whether the spiders see a structured view of the content and not messy. I hope this helps, if you have further questions, please feel free to ask. Regards, Vijay
-
There's no manipulation whatsoever. In fact, Google encourage website developers and SEOs to optimise/tidy their code and keep a good code-to-content ratio. This is why Google gives us so many tools in order to do so. It makes our sites easier to crawl for Google, and in return Google may even like us more for it!
Just found an article that sums it up quite nicely:
"Essentially what is being stated is a fairly logical conclusion: reduce the amount of code on your page and the content (you know, the place where your keywords are) takes a higher priority. Additionally compliance will, by necessity, make your site easy to crawl and, additionally, allow you greater control over which portions of your content are given more weight by the search engines. The thinking behind validating code for SEO benefits is that, once you have a compliant site, not only will your site be a better user experience on a much larger number of browsers, but you’ll have a site with far less code, that will rank higher on the search engines because of it."
- http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/official-google-prefers-valid-html-css/
But going back to your original post, "above-the-fold is dead", yadda yadda... So long as your content in the source is metaphorically "above the fold" and not drowning in heavy code, on the page itself just worry about giving your users the "experience" that they're looking for. And not how many pixels from the top of the browser your content is. Hope that makes more sense!
-
Great thank you, you read so many conflicting articles that it's difficult to know.
I'll see if we can look at our code, but I'd want to be mindful of not manipulating Google.
Thank you!
-
I feel prioritising elements to be "above the fold" is a bit of an outdated concept these days.
Where is the fold? Different devices and screen resolutions will have different folds, and more websites are being designed now to make the traditional "above the fold" section more visually interesting and designed for user experience, rather than packed full of content.
The higher the content is in the source code itself, the more weight it will have on the page. This doesn't necessarily translate to the "visually higher the content is on the page". Google is going to be reading from top to bottom of your code, so naturally you want the most important content/links to be found first. As long as you meet (or exceed!) the user's expectation of the content upon arrival, and you keep the code tidy in terms of how much Google has to read before it gets to the real valuable content, I doubt Google's going to worry about whether users have to scroll a little to get to it.
-
Hi Becky,
As far as i understand Google will not ignore however Google do treat some part of the page as more important than other. For instance, if you have written a description of the product and some of the description is been hide.
Google, will take that as the important piece of content been displayed for user and least important been hide.
I do not see any point for Google to ignore the fold one. -
Content below the fold is still read, however less value is placed on it. So it is still worth having content that is produced for below the fold as it will still help that page rank.
Show the user what they want to see when they land on the page, majority of the time in doing this you will actually show Google what they need to rank you.
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
-
Penalty for duplicate content on the same website?
Is it possible to get a penalty for duplicate content on the same website? I have a old custom-built site with a large number of filters that are pre-generated for speed. Basically the only difference is the meta title and H1 tag, with a few text differences here and there. Obviously I could no-follow all the filter links but it would take an enormous amount of work. The site is performing well in the search. I'm trying to decide whether if there is a risk of a penalty, if not I'm loath to do anything in case it causes other issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
How to Handle Annual Content - 2018-2019
Hello! I was wondering how other SEOs handles their annual content. We do well with ranking for our industry keywords with the year in the content. We have annual changes to publish and talk about each year. What do you do with the previous years content? Leave it, 301 redirect it or just revamp the same content so it updates to the current year?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE0 -
Category Pages & Content
Hi Does anyone have any great examples of an ecommerce site which has great content on category pages or product listing pages? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Would you consider this thin content?
Just wondering what the community thinks about the following URLS and whether they are essentially thin content that should be handled through a canonical, noindex or a parameter filtering system: https://www.adversetdisplay.co.uk/products/3x1-popup-exhibition-stand https://www.adversetdisplay.co.uk/products/3x2-popup-exhibition-stand https://www.adversetdisplay.co.uk/products/3x3-popup-exhibition-stand https://www.adversetdisplay.co.uk/products/3x4-popup-exhibition-stand https://www.adversetdisplay.co.uk/products/3x5-popup-exhibition-stand
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColinDocherty0 -
User generated content (Comments) - What impact do they have?
Hello MOZ stars! I have a question regarding user comments on article pages. I know that user generated content is good for SEO, but how much impact does it really have? For your information:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | idg-sweden
1 - All comments appears in source code and is crawled by spiders.
2 - A visitor can comment a page for up to 60 days.
3 - The amount of comments depends on the topic, we usually gets between 3-40 comments. My question:
1 - If we were to remove comments completely, what impact would it have from seo perspective? (I know you cant be certain - but please make an educated guess if possible)
2 - If it has a negative and-/or positive impact please specify why! 🙂 If anything is unclear or you want certain information don't hesitate to ask and I'll try to specify. Best regards,
Danne0 -
Stolen website content
Hello, recently we had a lot of content written for our new website. Unfortunately me and my partner have went separate ways, and he has used all my unique content on his own website. All our product descriptions, about us etc, he simply changed the name of the company. He has agreed to take the content down, so that i can now put this content on our new website which is currently being designed. Will google see this as duplicate content as it has been on a website before? Even though the content has been removed from the original website. I was worried as the content is no longer "fresh" so to speak. Can any one help me with this,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Best practices for handling https content?
Hi Mozzers - I'm having an issue with https content on my site that I need help with. Basically we have some pages that are meant to be secured, cart pages, auth pages, etc, and then we have the rest of the site that isn't secured. I need those pages to load correctly and independently of one another so that we are using both protocols correctly. Problem is - when a secure page is rendered the resources behind it (scripts, etc) won't load with the unsecured paths that are in our master page files currently. One solution would be to render the entire site in https only, however this really scares me from an SEO standpoint. I don't know if I want to put my eggs in that basket. Another solution is to structure the site so that secure pages are built differently from unsecured pages, but that requires a bit of re-structuring and new SOPs to be put in place. I guess my question is really about best practices when using https. How can I avoid duplication issues? When do I need to use rel=canonical? What is the best way to do things here to avoid heavy maintenance moving forward?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CodyWheeler0 -
How to seo : two domain having exactly the same content
Target website in question is ikt.co.id,it is hosted in our server located in US, what I am going to do right now is create a new subdomain id.ikt.co.id that served EXACTLY the same content but it is hosted in our Indonesia server. Whenever people go to any page within ikt.co.id, it will detect their country, if they are from Indonesia, I will redirect them to our Indonesia server. Okay, from SEO point of view I know there are couple problems such as Content duplication, and perhaps there are more. I think to handle the content duplication I can cannonical all URL on id.ikt.co.id to the ikt.co.id version instead. The same thing for social sharing, all links shared will be the one from ikt.co.id, so all of those link juices go to ikt.co.id, and for good measure I can also set the robots.txt to tell them not to index id.ikt.co.id ... All sounded good to me, until the I became paranoid and start thinking "have I missed anything that might hurt my SERP" ? here is the question, did i miss something important, if i did could you please tell me what it is and if possible brought the solution you think might work into this discussion?? Again thanks a lot for your help 😃
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IKT0