Hidden div until mouseover - is this spam?

[jiafei]

I find many webistes use this technology to make the page viewed quickly. The code section as below:

<td onMouseOver="setTab01Syn(1);">
<td onMouseOver="setTab01Syn(2);">

If your mouse moves on one keywords, they will display relate content in below table. and your mouse moves on other, then it displays other content.

e.g.
[yahoo.com...]
the content on the middle of the top area.
[Featured] [Entertainment] [Sports] [Life]

[tedster]

Hello jiafei, and welcome to the forum.

This is not a spam technique because a common user action (mouseover or click) makes the content visible.

[londrum]

it could be abused though, so got to be careful.
Some sneaky person might think to only make it appear if they moused over a 1x1 pixel image at the base of the page. that would be spam.

[jiafei]

Thanks londrum~
This is why I worried about.
If other people use this DIV tags for hidden the real content. And this content can also be seen by search rebot, but the visitors can not.
I think this is a new technology for using recently, and this is usually used with DIV/CSS format.
Does anyone know that it is any effect for search engine, especially Google?

[tedster]

Using CSS to hide content is a pretty old trick. It spread as fast as CSS itself spread. There are many specific CSS techniques that people have used in trying to game the engines by hiding text. If Google detects that a site is doing this, then Google can and often will penalize.

The thing I've always felt about hidden text - if you want those words on the page, then why not put them on the visible page? Google's algorithms (and those of other search engines, too) do not work by pure text match, anyway. And if you are successful at bringing some search traffic to your page through a hidden text trick, but that visitor doesn't see their search terms on the page after they arrive -- then what good did that traffic do for you?

One other thing to remember, just because a page uses some hidden text doesn't mean that trick is the cause of their good rankings.

[jiafei]

Hi Tedster,

Thank you very much for your reply.
I think I am very clear at your point. And I will not use the hidden div tags for SEO. It is not a good idea for improving the rank of my site.
But the question is that the search engine would care this? The hidden div can be used to make a quick view for the visitors. This is a good side. But the other side, the hidden div also can be used to trick. Will the search engine treat the two sides equally?
And If I use the Hidden Div Tags in my site to make quick view, Will Google punish me?

You are appreciated.
Jiafei

[tedster]

I work with sites that use the show/hide div appraoch for content and those pages do quite well in search engines. In fact, any of those DHTML drop-down menus that are so common are doing a similar thing.

On the other hand, I know of a site that was penalized quite heavily for positioning a bit of content outside the visible window. So I've already seen evidence that the two types of "hidden" content are treated differently.

[malachite]

Tedster - how hard does Google penalize client sites whose webmaster has hidden links to his own site without their knowledge? Would both sites be penalized or only the site on which the link is hidden?

[tedster]

I have not seen the target site of a link get nailed - but the site that's hiding the links? I've seen everything up to a complete removal from the index. The business is responsible for what their employees or their contractors do.

[londrum]

the thing is, for something like this, i'm pretty sure that a human being would check your site out before they actually banned it. or you could at least get it reviewed by a human being afterwards.
so as long as they can see that there is a real reason behind you using whatever technique then you'll be fine.