Does Google Allow Using CSS Display None / Hidden for Transcripts

[Ivan]

Hi, We're integrating over a dozen of videos to the site to be featured in a slideshow manner.

A selected video will be featured in the center of the page, meanwhile the user can click on the small thumbnails and change it to something else.

For the selected videos, there will be a transcript shown right next to the video.

The trick is, we cant show the transcripts for all the videos at once, since that's just bad user experience - the page will be miles long.

We want to hide the transcripts for the videos which are not shown either in a div - or in some other Google friendly manner.

The question is? Is this Google - legit? Is there a chance of being flagged, since so much content will be hidden?

[seoskunk]

A hide and show using some javascript is common practice, or ajax loading of the content. I don't think you have anything to worry about.

[tedster]

As long as a clear user action displays the originally "hidden" content, then Google is fine with it. However, I'd be careful with more than 100 kb of text. My opinion is based on a successful use of show/hide content divs over 8 years, plus comments from Google's JohnMu a few years back.

Also consider what the user experience will be when Google sends search traffic directly to the content in one of those "hidden" divs. In the past, I've used a script to capture the keyword and switch out the CSS display one of the hidden divs if it isn't visible in the default view.

With "no referrer" becoming more common these days, there may be a percentage that you can't capture these days but you can still serve the majority.