Scrolling div seen as hidden text?

[vero]

Relatively new site (2 years), good inbound links, very steady traffic, stats show 3/4 of referring links are Google search, the rest from MSN, Yahoo and various other sites.

10 days ago ago I suddenly started getting NO traffic from Google - none, nada, zip. (overall traffic is down accordingly)

The only thing that was added a few weeks before this happened was a scrolling div - it wasn't designed to put in hidden text or anything evil, it just worked with the site design. Could this be the problem?

Other things I have checked:
No problems reported in Webmaster tools
No major changes to the site's content, titles, etc
No "bad neighborhood" links
No affiliate programs, excess keywords, etc
Servers weren't down
Site: operator returns all my pages
Searches for various phrases (in quotes) on my site return results from my site, not any other site that may have copied the content

ANything else I haven't thought of? Thanks.

[edited by: tedster at 3:52 am (utc) on May 7, 2009]
[edit reason] remove graphic smile face [/edit]

[tedster]

I've never seen a scrolling div cause a ranking problem - that doesn't mean it can't happen.

A little while ago on Google's webmaster help forum, there was an issue with a penalty - a false positive - caused by an iframe. Google does use some calculations to simulate the layout and in that case, there was a flag raised by "too much whitespace".

Maybe there's a similar calculation that flags the condition "there's not enough space to display this content." As I said, I've never run into a problem, so I'm just conjecturing here.

[jetteroheller]

I used since 2000 a scrolling DIV with 60 pixel height

Above the fold a search box, below the fold a content description (a nice word to put all the keywords there)

I changed the design of my site 2005 and reduced to 35 pixel height

This caused middle December 2005 to be delisted at Google.
After a design change and a reinclusion request, I was listed again December 30th 2005.

I use now also scrolling DIVs, but be carefull, that they are not to small.

[fishfinger]

Thanks for that, very useful info!

[wingslevel]

its a difficult issue, there are lots of very good reasons for using scroll boxes - i've got to believe that jetteroheller got hand checked - seems like too explosive a parameter to put into an algo

there are lots of other ways to scroll text - java comes to mind - any other experiences?