Display None (Read More) Implimentation
-
Hi Mozzers, This question has been asked a few times over the years, but opinion seems to have changed drastically and i wanted to get an updated opinion from sources i trust.
On my category pages I have content above products. The content can push the product too far down, and if placed below is never viewed. To battle this I wanted to implement a "Read More" button so i could keep a couple hundred words there and expand it to the rest of the content if the user wanted. If not the products would remain near the top of the screen for better conversion.
I have implemented this on this page to test if it affects my keyword rankings before i go site wide. But also wanted an opinion if this practice is ok. The example page with it implemented can be found here.
The content im hiding isn't huge here but on other pages could be more. Is there a set ratio of text i should aim to keep / hide?
Any pitfalls i should watch out for?
I know google crawls the hidden content as its in the source code but should i be wary of a penalty is too much is hidden?
-
cheers rob, i will wait a week or 2 before rolling it site wide so i have to evidence of no effect to back me up incase it does go wrong and go from there.
thanks for your time
-
In my experience, there is no such thing as "too far" with this tactic. We had a page with 5,000 words on it, but only about 1,000 showing, and it ranked just fine (extremely well, in fact). As long as your content is registered in your source code so Google can crawl/index it, you're golden. At the end of the day, Google doesn't register what a user can see in this context. It sees all the content and treats its ranking process of the page accordingly.
-
thanks for the reply rob.
if i had a page with 1000 words would it be too much to hide 800 in a similar way as this and only have 200 showing? or is it fine for the same reasons you have listed? can i go too far with it?
-
Hello,
From your example, I see nothing wrong with your strategy. Hiding the text will retain the optimization and content when the page is crawled, but also makes the page/products readily available from a UX perspective. In this case, Google is crawling the Source Code and isn't worried about what a user sees.
We used a similar tactic on our Home Page to create content a user could read without stuffing the page/making it inaccessible. Our rankings were unaffected when we made the change.
As long as your content is withheld using a "Read More" button and doesn't appear on a separate page/URL, you are in good shape with what you have done here. You are still within Google's "Good Practice" realm.
Good luck moving forward with your site changes!
Rob
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
-
How many times will Google read a page?
Hello! Do you know if Google reads a page more than once? We want to include a very robust menu that has a lot of links, so we were thinking about coding a very simple page that loads first and immediately loading the other code that has all the links thinking that perhaps Google will only read the first version but won't read it the second time with all the links. Do you know if we will get penalized? I'm not sure if I got the idea across, let me know if I need to expand more. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alinaalvarez0 -
Does 302 redirects pass link juice ? - I've read conflicting reports
Hi Mozzers Ive noticed that I have some 302 redirects on my website which have been there for some time . They should really 301's but I am wondering if 302s pass link juice or not as from what I've read they don't so I just wanted to check if anyone knew for sure, thanks pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Are there any issues with search engines (other than Google/Bing) reading Protocol-Relative URLs?
Are there any issues with search engines (other than Google/Bing) reading Protocol-Relative URLs? Specifically with Baidu and Yandex?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WikiaSEO0 -
Can Googlebots read canonical tags on pages with javascript redirects?
Hi Moz! We have old locations pages that we can't redirect to the new ones because they have AJAX. To preserve pagerank, we are putting canonical tags on the old location pages. Will Googlebots still read these canonical tags if the pages have a javascript redirect? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
CSS Display None / Hidden? Will I get in Trouble?
Hi, We're integrating over a dozen of videos to the site to be featured in a slideshow manner. A selected video will be featured in the center of the page, meanwhile the user can click on the small thumbnails and change it to something else. For the selected videos, there will be a transcript shown right next to the video. The trick is, we cant show the transcripts for all the videos at once, since that's just bad user experience - the page will be miles long. We want to hide the transcripts for the videos which are not shown either in a div - or in some other Google friendly manner. The question is? Is this Google - legit? Is there a chance of being flagged, since so much content will be hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sophia1231 -
Does Google bot read embedded content?
Is embedded content "really" on my page? There are many addons nowadays that are used by embedded code and they bring the texts after the page is loaded. For example - embedded surveys. Are these read by the Google bot or do they in fact act like iframes and are not physically on my page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Can Google Read Text in Carousel
so what is the best practice for getting Google to be able to read text that populates via JQuery in a carousel. If the text is originally display none, is Google going to be able to crawl it? Are there any limits to what Google can crawl when it comes to JavaScript and text? Or is it always better just to hardcopy the text on the page source?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900 -
Can Google read my backlink in Javascript??
Hi SeoMoz community! I have a software product, which our clients implement onto their websites. It is like a pop up box. I know that backlinks are very important for SEO ranking, and I really want to give our clients 2 options of product: 1. you can get the free/cheaper option if you use the code which has a keyworded backlink to our site on it 2. you can pay small fee if you don't want to use the version with a link to our site on it Now, the problem is that the product is written entirely in Javascript, and I don't think that Google crawls this, do they? Is there a way around this? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qdigi0