<div>s and hidden text - how far can you go?

[pbaddock]

I have a client who recently employed an SEO agency who piled a stack of spammy keyword content into a div tag that triggers a popup when a user clicks on a link. Aside from the nature of the content which they put in there (obviously not a great idea), it did prompt a conversion at my company about how far you can take <div>s and how smart google are with hidden content (and what in fact they consider to be hiddent).

Some pages we build use div's to offer 'tabbed' view of content on pages ie clicking on tabs shows different content - all on one page without re-loading (aesthetically pleasing, fast display with no reload).

If the content on a page is legitimate, useful, well written content - is it risky to place in div tags where some parts of the text are not displayed on the page to the user but accessible via navigation elements on the page without reloading? What defined hidden content when it comes to <div>s?

(I note that the google cached text only view has listed their spammy keyword content so google seem to have picked it up in their crawl)

This thread suggests its ok:
[webmasterworld.com...]
This thread suggests that this is simply not best use of the content in terms of achieving pages indexed:
[webmasterworld.com...]

....is this risk free? (the use of div's - not the spammy content), or likely to incur future probs.

Would appreciate any further thoughts / opinion?

[rainborick]

I've yet to see a clear, official policy statements on this issue from any of the major search engines. The various online representatives don't offer much help either except to vaguely mention that they will take the webmaster's intentions into consideration.

Clearly, using CSS and JavaScript to create more dynamic content is a common and useful practice that is widely tolerated by the search engines. Most of the drop-down and pop-up menu systems rely on some form of these techniques, as do many of the pop-up annotation systems. I've often used things like this myself without any problems, so I'm pretty confident in using them as I please. What I would recommend to others is to not worry at all about menu or navigation systems that rely on display:none. For <div>s I would suggest doing your best to avoid the appearance of keyword stuffing by making the text grammatically correct and robust - that is, not writing as if you're sending a cell phone text message. This should keep you clear of any automated SPAM detection the search engines employ. I say that because I don't think they do much about this issue on an automated level. We rarely see reports of any search engine bot crawl a .css or .js file. I have a hunch that they only impose penalties in this area after a manual inspection, and any automated systems they have are used to flag suspected violations.