Forum Moderators: open
I know this subject has been pounded to death because I've read most of the posts on the topic. However, I have a quick question (sort of).
From what I've gathered, search engines frown on hidden layers because they consider them to be spam, but there is only a small possibility that a site will be punished for their use. Obviously, there are some legitimate hidden layer uses: navigation menus etc.
On my site, we wanted to add some text to the homepage that could be viewed if a visitor clicked on a link. We wanted this option because the way the site is currently designed we don’t have much text on the front page and as you can imagine this does not help in Google.
The hidden text is not links into the site or keyword spamming, but an intro paragraph to the site. The visitor doesn’t need to see the text, but if they do, that’s fine as well. One possibility we are considering is putting up welcome messages in different languages; when the visitor clicks on a welcome message, the message will show up in that language.
Is what we have considered spamming by the search engines? Is it likely someone might report this type of hidden text? Does anyone know if it is better to use a MouseOver or some other method to display the text? Is is better to have the text hidden in a certain way? Right now it has a style="display: none; tag in the div with javascript controlling the viewing.
Sorry for the long post! Thanks!
I wouldn't worry about using hiddens divs for this sort of work. It sounds perfectly legitimate, and certainly shouldn't be considerd spam.
As for using an onMouseOver to trigger the show/hide functionality; again, yes.
The important thing is that the source displays all the copy as HTML, whether it's hidden or not, and from the sound of it your approach does.
I wouldn't worry about this.
No. Wait. That's a lie - I would worry, but I'd do it anyway. It's not unethical and so you shouldn't get punished. I doubt you're likely to get picked up on this on an automatic sweep.
There is an increasing clash between unethical SEO and valid accessibility techniques. The skip navigation links required on a fully accessibile site are often "hidden" in a div layer. There's also the background image with "hidden" h1 text as a way to ensure accessibile title graphics.
Clarification from Google or Yahoo would be nice. I doubt it'll come from Google, ever, but Yahoo might sell a "thumbs up" review service.
