Hidden category content really bad?
-
Hi Guys,
I'm working with a site which has hidden based category content see:
http://i.imgur.com/Sgko2we.jpg
It seems google are still indexing these pages but i heard Google might ignore or reduce the benefit of hidden content like this.I just want to confirm if this is the case? And if this is a really bad thing for SEO?Cheers.Sgko2we.jpg
-
You are not at risk for being removed from Google's search index. In fact, Google has recently adjusted their stance on hidden content and no longer ding sites for having it **IF **it's done for the benefit of UX, specifically mobile device UX. Here's a recent statement from Google's Gary Illyes on the subject: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-content-tabs-hidden-change-22950.html
Review the layout and functionality of these pages, if you believe it's helpful for UX, then stick with it. You could also run a test where you take a sample of your category pages and unhide the content by default to see if they perform better.
-
Google does not reduce the effects of hidden copy, it is actually a huge negative. Copy like this is considered a trademark of older, spammy sites so when Google finds it (and Google will) it can reduce your page's visibility a little all the way to being a factor for your site to be delisted from Google. There is no point in placing any copy onto a page if it is not displayed in a user readable fashion.
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
-
Shall we add engaging and useful FAQ content in all our pages or rather not because of duplication and reduction of unique content?
We are considering to add at the end of alll our 1500 product pages answers to the 9 most frequently asked questions. These questions and answers will be 90% identical for all our products and personalizing them more is not an option and not so necessary since most questions are related to the process of reserving the product. We are convinced this will increase engagement of users with the page, time on page and it will be genuinely useful for the visitor as most visitors will not visit the seperate FAQ page. Also it will add more related keywords/topics to the page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
On the downside it will reduce the percentage of unique content per page and adds duplication. Any thoughts about wether in terms of google rankings we should go ahead and benefits in form of engagement may outweight downside of duplication of content?0 -
How do the Quoras of this world index their content?
I am helping a client index lots and lots of pages, more than one million pages. They can be seen as questions on Quora. In the Quora case, users are often looking for the answer on a specific question, nothing else. On Quora there is a structure setup on the homepage to let the spiders in. But I think mostly it is done with a lot of sitemaps and internal linking in relevancy terms and nothing else... Correct? Or am I missing something? I am going to index about a million question and answers, just like Quora. Now I have a hard time dealing with structuring these questions without just doing it for the search engines. Because nobody cares about structuring these questions. The user is interested in related questions and/or popular questions, so I want to structure them in that way too. This way every question page will be in the sitemap, but not all questions will have links from other question pages linking to them. These questions are super longtail and the idea is that when somebody searches this exact question we can supply them with the answer (onpage will be perfectly optimised for people searching this question). Competition is super low because it is all unique user generated content. I think best is just to put them in sitemaps and use an internal linking algorithm to make the popular and related questions rank better. I could even make sure every question has at least one other page linking to it, thoughts? Moz, do you think when publishing one million pages with quality Q/A pages, this strategy is enough to index them and to rank for the question searches? Or do I need to design a structure around it so it will all be crawled and each question will also receive at least one link from a "category" page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | freek270 -
Can a website be punished by panda if content scrapers have duplicated content?
I've noticed recently that a number of content scrapers are linking to one of our websites and have the duplicate content on their web pages. Can content scrapers affect the original website's ranking? I'm concerned that having duplicated content, even if hosted by scrapers, could be a bad signal to Google. What are the best ways to prevent this happening? I'd really appreciate any help as I can't find the answer online!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Faceted Navigation and Dupe Content
Hi, We have a Magento website using layered navigation - it has created a lot of duplicate content and I did ask Google in GWT to "No URLS" most of the querystrings except the "p" which is for pagination. After reading how to tackle this issue, I tried to tackle it using a combination of Meta Noindex, Robots, Canonical but still it was a snowball I was trying to control. In the end, I opted for using Ajax for the layered navigation - no matter what option is selected there is no parameters latched on to the url, so no dupe/near dupe URL's created. So please correct me if I am wrong, but no new links flow to those extra URL's now so presumably in due course Google will remove them from the index? Am I correct in thinking that? Plus these extra URL's have Meta Noindex on them too - I still have tens of thousands of pages indexed in Google. How long will it take for Google to remove them from index? Will having Meta No Index on the pages that need to be removed help? Any other way of removing thousands of URLS from GWT? Thanks again, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Really bad technical SEO and Nofollow
I posted a question week ago about a client with really awful SEO errors to the tune of over 75k violations including massive duplicate content (over 8000 pages) and pages with too many links (homepage alone has over 300 links), and I was thinking, why not try to nofollow the product pages which are the ones causing so many issue. They have super low domain authority, and are wasting spider energy, have no incoming links. Thoughts? BTW the entire site is an ecommerce site wth millions of products and each product is its own wordpress blog post...YIKES! Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | runnerkik1 -
Two Sites Similar content?
I just started working at this company last month. We started to add new content to pages like http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/49/-/181/1137/Bridgestone-Motorcycle-Tires. This is their main site. Then i realized it also put the new content on their sister site http://www.jakewilson.com/t/52/-/343/1137/Bridgestone-Motorcycle-Tires. the first site is the main site and I think will get credit for the unique new content. The second one I do not think will get credit and will more than likely be counted as duplicate content. We are changing this so it will no longer be the same. However, I am curious to see ways people think we could fix this issues? Also is it effecting both sits for just the second one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoRM0 -
404 for duplicate content?
Sorry, I think this is my third question today... But I have a lot of duplicated content on my site. I use joomla so theres a lot of unintentional duplication. For example, www.mysite.com/index.php exists, etc. Up till now, I thought I had to 301 redirect or rel=canonical these "duplicated pages." However, can I just 404 it? Is there anything wrong with this rpactice in regards to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
Duplicate Content from Article Directories
I have a small client with a website PR2, 268 links from 21 root domains with mozTrusts 5.5, MozRank 4.5 However whenever I check in google for the amount of link: Google always give the response none. My client has a blog and many articles on the blog. However they have submitted their blog article every time to article directories as well, plain and simle creating duplicate and content. Is this the reason why their link: is coming up as none? Is there something to correct the situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielkamen0