Hi, This thread is not related to when people fill up their pages with keywords for SEO and then hide them with CSS. Please read. In this case, a store has very long product names, and it also becomes redundant. For example a page is specifically for WIDGETS Instead of displaying the product names as: blue widget green widget etc.. they hide the word widget with CSS, to make it less redundant. But the word widget is very important for SEO So, does google index that word 'widget'that has been hidden with CSS? Thanks so much
Short Answer: Yes they will see it. Longer answer: Search engine spiders will read the content of your page, and they typically ignore any markup they encounter. So when they read through the source code and encounter the div hiding the text, it will read it with out any trouble. The key to success with optimizing your website is to truly make it about the user experience. Forget about Googlebot, forget about search engines. Remember why you built the site in the first place. If it isn't user friendly, then you won't get many users to stick around to learn more about your product.
You can get penalty for doing that so if you optimize your page with right keywords it should work out.
Thanks for the response. I am very familiar with SEO as I have been doing it for 10 years. Just wasn't sure about the text hidden CSS cause things are always changing. There reason we do hide text it to make user experience better in this case. So instead of saying widget all the time, we want to showcase the difference between widgets. hence, instead of blue widget, green widget, big widget, small widget we hide widget, and just show blue, green, big, small but the word widget is actually very important as a theme for that page. we just don't want to bombard users with it. make sense?
It makes perfect sense. You want to show Google a keyword stuffed page, but not your visitors. I don't think Google considers that a good practice. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzu9mUJj9GU Cheers James
The easy answer is to put your site in the box on this site: http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php and if the text appears in the outputted results then google will see it
And it would certainly get indexed and I agree - not recommended. If users can't see it, better not to have it in your pages!!!
If you think it is absolutely necessary to do it, then you could use an image for the words blue, yellow etc and give each image an alt tag like blue widget, yellow widget etc. I would refrain from hiding text using CSS or any other method as there is a very good chance you will be penalized by Google. EDIT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBLvn_WkDJ4 Cheers James
Google's Spider reads only HTML nothing else. It will read but Google will penelize you for this. They don't like Hidden or semi visible content. Use ALT Tags in image to make rich keyword density.
Alright, it makes sense. If the term widget is that important to your SEO efforts, then let me suggest this. Keep the term on your page, but make sure that it's used in moderation. Most people will suggest anywhere from 6-8% saturation, I personally have not seen any negative effects from exceeding this amount, as long as the text continues to read well. I would then concentrate your link building with the term widget in your anchor text. That should help to increase the page relevance without having to worry about whether or not Google thinks that you've been keyword stuffing. In my experience it's good to be aggressive, and you won't know what will work until you try it. But there are times where I still like to play it safe.
Wow! You guys are not understanding. The goal is not to cheat, it's the opposite. We are actually trying to make the experience better for the customer. The products have the product category in it - widget, just like every site has, for example: iphone 3GS, iphone 3G, Iphone 2G And these are the product names, so that's how they would be listed on the site. In our case, the product names are longer, so we are hiding part of it so it's easy for users to read the page. In the example above, it would show 3GS, 3G, 2G We are not trying to cheat. We actually used to show the entire names, but executives at the client want to show shorter names to user. Does it make sense? Thanks
Yeah it will index such content, but it is harmful for SEO. !! bcoz it is black hat seo trick which is not allowed by google.
People understand what you want to achieve, but If you show one page to humans and another to bots, then regardless of weather you think it benefits your visitors or not, Google may think you are cheating. If you have a product page for widgets, with the title "Widgets" and have hyperlinks on that page linking to the various widget colors, but you don't want to have the word 'widget' in the hyperlink. Then you could try adding a title tag to the link, like: <a href="blue-widget.html" title="Blue widget">Blue</a> Code (markup): If the landing page for the blue widgets has the title "Blue widgets" then Google shouldn't have any trouble understanding what the page is about. If you want to have the word 'widget' in the link for SEO purposes, but do not want visitors to see the word (for whatever visual reason) and try to hide it using CSS, then that is seen as cheating by many, regardless of weather you think it helps your visitors or not. Does that make sense? Cheers James
Hey skuba google will definitely index it. But dont forget to use "Allow" in robots.txt file. (I mean allow google to crawl that css file). It doesn't comes under cheat if u do this. Even it doesn't comes under blackhat also. Thanks.
Why don't you try categorizing them rather then hide "widgets". This way widgets is present enough, yet not annoying to the user. For example: Colored Widgets Red Green Blue Small Widgets size 1 size 2 size 3 Big Widgets size 1 etc...
Thanks guys. I just found out that we actually using javascript to achieve this and the JS code can be accessed on the source. So, we are not really hiding it, since it's clearly in the code. This is an example of how we are doing it