Spam Detector throwing errors for hidden text in Drop Down Menus

Sub menu is hidden from view until mousover

[Lorel]

I found a Search Engine Spam Detector that lets you know if it finds any errors that search engines could determine as spam and checked several sites and it is throwing warnings for hidden text for all my drop menus where the sub menu is hidden from view until mouseover controlled in CSS.

Would this be something to be concerned about or are search engines (and particularly Google) be wise enough to know this is not deliberate hidden text.

I would assume this would outlaw all drop down menus if that was the case.

[tedster]

You assume correctly, I'd say. As long as any and all hidden content can be made visible by a mouseover event, you should be clean,

[KenB]

Really there are too many legitimate and very common uses for "display:none" or "visiblity:hidden". If Google penalized just for the use of this they would be denying web developers two very important DHTML tools and punishing a lot of innocent sites.

[Bewenched]

It could be possible that they are flagged and a human review is then done, but that might take too many man hours for some search engines to do.