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
-
SEO rank down after Magento migration
Since November we migrated our shop from Magento 1 to 2 and our organic traffic has dropped by 50%. We still haven't figured out the cause (or a solution). Are there more Magento users who have the same issue? Charlotte (www.dochorse.nl)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DocHorse0 -
Internal anchor text
Hello, I am wondering how to deal with internal anchor text. I read here and there that it shouldn't be too optimised but I also read that this is how google understands what my page is aout. I have breadcrumbs with my main keyword in the anchor text and can't change that it is automatic. In other words if i have 10 breadcrumb going to my top page with the keyword can I be penalised ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Splitting a strong page - SEO
Hi, I have a page with high traffic that is showing a list of flea markets in a unique URL. We are redesigning our website and we have created a listing directory of flea markets, so the users can look up and find the information for each. Each flea market will have its own URL in the future, and the listing directory shows only summarized info of each flea market in the results. Before activating the new flea market section, I would like to make sure which is our best bet: Option 1: Create pages with same URL/content as the current ones, which we won't link from frontend, and besides that, use the new flea market section on a separate page. Option 2: Redirect the current page to the new flea market section. As an inaccurate reference because it depends on many variables and SEO doesn't have an actual number, I understand this is more or less how it would work: Example Option 1 (after 1 week of launch): Old Flea Market Pages SEO traffic: 10,000 visits/month New Copied Flea Market Pages traffic: 9,700 (maybe a bit below 100 because of design changes etc) New Flea Market Section traffic: 500 visits/month (then increase over time) Example Option 2 (after 1 week of launch): Old Flea Market Pages SEO traffic: 10,000 visits/month New Redirected Flea Market Pages traffic: 9,000 (in principle PageRank wouldn't be affected, but other rankings might) New Flea Market Section traffic: (joined above, then increase over time) According to this, Option 1 would give us more total future visits compared to redirecting, plus the new flea market pages would add to it. If redirecting, the new flea market section would add up some SEO juice to the old page, but not as much as Option 1 (not redirecting). Please confirm. Which option is the best one and why? Thank you, New 301 Redirection Rules: https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading10 -
Local SEO and PO Boxes
What is the best way to do local SEO when the business has a physical address, but the mailing address is through a PO Box. Can you still list your business on Google Maps, Google places, yahoo, bing etc... with the physical address?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | melen0 -
Victim of negative SEO
Hello, I'm one of those people that got the "unnatural links" message from google. Since i run my site from the very first day and always was a one man business i know all the ins and outs of the website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Henkiepenkie
Basicly i have never ever used a seo company to submit my site anywhere.
Never ever i used any shady tactic to get better ranks.
The only thing i did was trading traffic/links with real active websites, being daily updated, high traffic, etc etc. So. After i got notified in webmaster tools i started digging into a list (provided by webmaster tools) to find out why i got this message (meanwhile i lost 75% of my se traffic in past 3 months) After searching for hours i found out that in the past 2 / 3 months my site has been spammed on about 150 forums (completely dead forums with nothing but spam on it) There was no logic at all since my site got linked with the most ridiculous and unlogical word phrases.
My site is adult related and all spam links contained word phrases like "bangladesh mobile" or "rock girl" or "animal abuse" or "ringtones" etc etc. if i ever would be so stupid to start spamming my 7 year old strong business i would at least use titles that would make sence. anyway.
I can't do nothing about these forums, i don't own them, i can't erase them and if there are any owners, they simply don't respond.
I made a list of all the forums and send it to google but the only response they come up with is "there are still unnatural links". I hardly believe they did anything with that list i send them. I don't know what else i can do and was hoping that somebody could advice me on what to do here besides sending google messages on a daily base. cheers0 -
Domain expiration and seo
My domain name is free with my service with yahoo but it expires every year and gets extended automatically as I continue service, how does this impact my seo efforts? I've heard that the search engines prefer sites to expire in 3 years or more? Is this a fact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Server cache and SEO
I have a question about server cache and seo. For example. www.chanel.com.cn , the server is in US, and uses China Cache to improve local Chinese users access speed, so what do you think this way will work for search engines spiders too? when a spider is crawlling the website, does the content it crawl on US server or China cache? what's best practice for those kind of SEO on server side? thanks Boson
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | topchinaseo0 -
Will having image lightbox with content on a web page SEO friendly?
This website is done in CMS. Will having lightbox pop up with content be SEO friendly? If you go to the web page and click on the images at the bottom of the page. There are lightbox that will display information. Will these lightbox content information be crawl by Google? Will it be consider as content for the url http://jennlee.com/portfolio/bran.. Thanks, John
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VizionSEO990