Does google index pages with hidden divs?

Question

I am starting to redesign and develop a site that contains a lot of text and I am thinking of ways to organize the information on the site so that it looks cleaner. On some parts of the site I would like to implement a jquery toggle effect where some content is placed in a hidden div and that content will show or hide depending on a user's onclick event.

Would this technique of organizing content greatly harm the SEO of the site? At what point would google start viewing this as spam and drop the site from being indexed all together?

//Update - found some answers.

I guess to clarify, as a response to some answers below, the purpose of the hidden divs would be to toggle between showing/hiding the content for organizational purpose where any hidden text would eventually be shown to the user.

However, after much digging around, Matt Cutts from google does pretty much say that as long as you are not keyword stuffing your hidden text and abusing the system by trying to trick the googlebot, you should generally be fine. He also gives a funny example of keyword stuffing gone wrong.

Adao

Answer 1

It will be indexed but can be frowned upon by Google if you are hiding/showing content for SEO reasons. In other words, what Google sees should be what the user sees when clicking the link.

Lovering

Answer 2

Aparently yes.

Nothing escapes the eye of sauron.

Jocose

link doesn't work anymore – Nephrotomy

Answer 3

Poe's idea of using an "off stage" div (negative position) is widely used and is as well known to the Google bot as a div with display:hidden or visibility:none.

Here's how to do it:

Have all of your objects totally displayed and completely visible and right on stage in your HTML code, just as Google wants.... but THEN... have your javascript onload event apply the positioning that you want in the browser client.

The result... perfect SEO, and a perfect experience for the visitor.

Hospitalet

This is also better for users without JavaScript. There are not too many of those on most sites, but it happens. – Chetchetah

I had the same idea ... but with a timeout in a script immediately following the tag that would execute exactly 1ms to hide it. ;) So far it's too fast to notice. (I figured since Google supports running scripts now [to some degree], it might be safer, since it may not trigger timers [but I don't know how to confirm this]). – Kirbykirch

I don't like the flicker tho' – Ornas

Answer 4

As long as the hidden content is relevant to the page it should not appear to be spam.

I have put hidden text on pages, toggled visible text and when using a graphic for a heading I have a CSS hidden H1 heading for Google.

Bartolemo

Answer 5

It's definitely OK, as I've done it many times without any SEO penalties.

Negrito

Answer 6

I wouldn't hide it. If people don't want to read it they can skip over. When I've hidden text it doesn't seem to be seen by the Googlebot as well as text within regular html.

Libertine

Answer 7

The best and satisfactory result, i found here.

Hidden text and links 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. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

Using white text on a white background Locating text behind an image Using CSS to position text off-screen Setting the font size to 0 Hiding a link by only linking one small character—for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that's not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?

However, not all hidden text is considered deceptive. For example, if your site includes technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript, images, or Flash files, using descriptive text for these items can improve the accessibility of your site. Remember that many human visitors using screen readers, mobile browsers, browsers without plug-ins, and slow connections will not be able to view that content either and will benefit from the descriptive text as well. You can test your site’s accessibility by turning off JavaScript, Flash, and images in your browser, or by using a text-only browser such as Lynx. Some tips on making your site accessible include:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66353?hl=en

Vine

Answer 8

perhaps hiding your content is bad for SEO, but maybe you dont have to hide it.

Instead of using "display:hidden" just use creative positioning.

place your "hidden" content say 7680 pixels off the screen using "left: 7680px" or "margin-top: -7680px"

Then use your java script to change the positioning of the content as you wish.

Lager