Harms of hidden categories on SEO
-
On our website we have some invisible/hidden categories on our site. Can anyone advise whether these are harmful in terms of SEO?
-
You could legitimately have hidden content in terms of category/URLs - maybe only made available if you sign up as an example. The guidelines are referring to manipulating on page content so there are elements within that page that are hidden and by default manipulating.
-
Firstly I cannot actually think of any legitimate reason for hiding or making a category invisible, however if you had one that means you don’t want the content to be indexed then you would be best blocking that Category within your robots.txt file.
If it is for any other reason and the content is indexable by ANY search engine not just Google then you run the risk of being penalised.
In fact, Google’s guidelines state that, “hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
-
Invisible to who? If they are invisible to the search engines (e.g. blocked via robots.txt) they could not be harmful, but if you gain any link or other quality equity through those pages, your will not get any additional domain authority or organic traffic to them.
That said, if the hidden categories were resorts of the main categories on your site then you would want to hide them from the search engine as they would be seen as low quality duplicate content. Otherwise if they were visible they could negatively impact your site.
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
-
Newbie SEO ?: Does my About page URL have to contain the word About?
New to WordPress and SEO. Built and launched my website last week. The URL was originally domain/about. However, I installed Yoast plugin and it told me "about" was a stop word. So, without too much thought (my first problem), I changed the url (before Google crawled me) to clearwingcommunications.com/storytelling. Since then, I've noticed that sites I know are optimized have their URL with the word "about." So, is this considered a bad practice? My site HAS been crawled at this point. If I change it back to About and do a 301 redirect, does that hurt reporting? Thanks for your help! Christy
On-Page Optimization | | christyr0 -
No-index all the posts of a category
Hi everyone! I would like no-indexing all the posts of a specific category of my wordpress site. The problem is that the structure of my URL is composed without /category/: www.site-name.ext/date/post-name/
On-Page Optimization | | salvyy
so without /category-name/ Is possibile to disallow the indexing of all the posts of the category via robots.txt? Using Yoast Plugin I can put the no-index for each post, but I would like to put the no-index (or disallow/) a time for all the post of the category. Thanks in advance for your help and sorry for my english. Mike0 -
Paying someone for SEO help?
Moz has been very helpful but since my site was hit by Google Panda and I am getting very little organic traffic, I am thinking about having someone who really knows SEO take a look and give me some help. However, I have no idea how to find someone reputable. Any advice for hiring someone for SEO help (on a budget?)
On-Page Optimization | | 2bloggers0 -
SEO targeted text on Mobile Site Version
Hey Mozzers, I run SEO for a retail site www.uncommongoods.com. We are building a mobile version of our site on m.uncommongoods.com On each of the category pages of www.uncommongoods.com, we have included a few lines of text at the bottom of the page to get some of our target keywords into the body. As an example, if you look at this page: http://www.uncommongoods.com/office/journals-stationery/journals You'll see this copy at the bottom: "Find unique journals and diaries at UncommonGoods. Our creative journal gifts are great for marking special occasions with sentimental keepsakes." We are debating whether or not to remove this copy on the category pages of our mobile site, just to keep the pages as clean as possible. Would there be any risk in leaving this out ? Thanks for your help on this! -Zack
On-Page Optimization | | znotes0 -
URL and SEO
How much weight do search engines give the URL? We're a medical call center provider and medicalcallcenter is part of our URL. Does that help us much? Thanks!!
On-Page Optimization | | THMCC0 -
Local SEO techniques
We have a competitor who has listed all the local villages and towns in the area that he wishes to target. these are listed in his footer and appear on every page. I understand that ideally, each location targeted would have it's own page with unique and relevant content. Is this competitor's approach a good one even though the names are essentially duplicates?
On-Page Optimization | | ojwilliams80 -
How much does punctuation affect on-page SEO?
I have a page on a site that is targeted for "men's custom suits." Using the on-page analysis tool from SEOmoz it gives me an F for "mens custom suits" but an A with the apostrophe. Even though the apostrophe is proper English grammar, does it affect rankings either way?
On-Page Optimization | | cgray010 -
Breadcrumb position SEO impact
Hi all, Our UX designers are working on a new page design, and the breadcrumb position looks somewhat strange - it's almost in the middle of the page. The new page looks like this (the breadcrumb is below the head banner), but it's a showcase page that contains about 150 items. Each of them has a small thumbnail, title, category and short description. They've decided to use the head banner's place and have there all items, grouped in categories that visitors can browse. The breadcrumb menu is at 900 pixels from the top of the page In other words, you have the major part of this page content in front of the breadcrumb menu. Are there any SEO implications in such case? Should we use breadcrumbs on this page if they're not at the top? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | lgrozeva
Maggie0