Can Hidden Loader & Page Fade GOOGLE PENALTY?

[lobas]

Hi,

My site has a search box and it uses a loading sprite in the form of an overlay which becomes visible when the preforms a search.

I also have a page fade which gives the site a fancy fade in and fade out effect.

Will this cause an automatic google penalty?

The site has been under performing and it has strong links and content.

Here is the css.



#overlay {
display: none;
height: 100%;
overflow: hidden;
position: fixed;
top: 0 !important;
width: 100%;
z-index: 999999;
}


#pagefade {
background-color: #FFFFFF;
display: none;
height: 5000px;
margin-top: 128px;
overflow: hidden;
position: absolute;
width: 954px;
z-index: 999999;

[tedster]

No automatic penalty, no.

Content that loads hidden but can be made visible by some natural user action is not a problem. Well, I suppose it might trigger a false positive of some kind - anything's possible - but I've never heard of a penalty in reality, unless the hidden content can't be made visible by some user action.

[goodroi]

I think this would be more of an issue during a manual review (assuming it was being abused).

[smithaa02]

Cutts has an official reply to a question like that here:

[youtube.com...]

(you can read the youtube transcript which is quite good if you don't want to watch the video)

Reading between the lines...I presume he's saying that as long as the content that googlebot sees and disguised googlebot sees is pretty much the same, you would be ok.

[deadsea]

That is the kind of thing that sites I've worked with have been very concerned with. Matt Cutts say in that video that there is a possibility that you could get accidentally classified as hiding text using legit techniques. If you do get penalized because of it, maybe Google will tell you about the penalty in webmaster tools. But maybe not.

I think Matt's point about other sites and frameworks is a good one. Are there lots of other sites using the same code? If so, you should be fine. If not, maybe you should discontinue the practice or find a way of doing it through a standard framework.