Is this a no no?

hiding div with complete text of article then showing on click

[5x54u]

I am attemptng to deal with a site owner who wants what looks to me like is a Tolstoy chpater of text on his homepage.

I went the hard way first with DB and PHP.

I then found a soultion using JavaScript and hide/show div on link click.

On the homepage it has a snippit of his bla bla with a more... link and when clicked, the intire text shows.

Is this bad when met with Gbot? Or can it not even read it?

Very concerned as I have created an entire new site with PHP/SQL and CSS. All 301 Perms in place before launch.

[5x54u]

<bump> Anyone....?

[chrisgarrett]

Advice I am usually given is "does it make sense for the users". Just be aware though that some people believe googlebot has a byte limit on how much it likes to gobble per page.

[suidas]

Certainly Googlebot can read it. The question is rather, "Will they see it as spam?" You can see how hidden divs could be used as a spamming technique. There is a thread going on in Google News about CSS and spam, particularly whether Google dislike absolute positioning.

I think its clear there must be a lot of wiggle room for CSS, but this is something of an extreme case. Google is going to wonder why 95% of the page's content is invisible!

You might also note how wasteful the scheme is. If someone arrives at a tiny page, but it takes forever to load, they are going to perceive (subconsciously or not) that the sponsoring organization is incompetent or irritating.