Show / Hide DIVs using JS or CSS, and avoiding -950 problems

[chucky]

I've found quite a few threads on this but most are prior to the 950 penalty. e.g. [webmasterworld.com...]

What is Googles current view of this and what is the best way to implement it.

a.) to enable Google to crawl the text without penalty.
b.) failing that to be able to use it without Google crawling it.

Many thanks.

[Robert Charlton]

chucky - The following still current thread applies to some of your questions, but not all of them....

The "Mega Menu" Problem and Google Rankings
[webmasterworld.com...]

If you overused hidden divs, so you had too much navigation on any one page, I'd say that you would definitely be bumping into the mega menu considerations.

[tedster]

Several sites I work with use show/hide divs in the content area and there's no trouble. If the text is viewable in the source code and doesn't require another call to the server (as in AJAX technologies) then all the divs get indexed and Google is fine with it, as long as an obvious user action can make the content visible.

If you're using show/hide divs for a hover menu system, then because anchor text is a more sensitive area of the algorithm, sometimes you can run into what I called "mega menu" problem - the thread Robert reference above.