Hidden DIVs with Links

Legit use, but will it cause a penalty?

[jonrichd]

I am about to work on a new site that is in the prototype stage. The designers have set it up with five main sections, each represented by a graphical menu item on the left hand side.

The text submenus appear when a menu item is clicked by showing hidden divisions on the page. The usability factor is that a visitor can 'walk' all the menu items on the site without having to do a page reload.

From the spider's point of view, there will be four hidden divisions on every page it visits, each with links to other pages on the site.

1. Will this cause a hidden link penalty?

2. If not, will Googlebot follow the links in the hidden divisions? I would rather it didn't, since that would help link theming.

All these links are normal HTML links. I suppose I could use JavaScript on the 'hidden' divisions -- but there would still be hidden text.

Thanks for any guidance.

[Brett_Tabke]

1) yes, from a hand check as your competition shops you.
2) yes.

[jonrichd]

Just out of curiosity, why would this technique fail a hand check? Human users can make all the links visible by clicking on a main menu item, so there is no intent to deceive anyone here.

My original concern was that this would fail a computer test, not a human test.

[4eyes]

If I take the liberty of rephrasing the question:

..is there an increased risk of incurring a penalty by using hidden links even if I think they are innocent

The answer is Yes.

It doesn't matter whether we think they are innocent, it only matters whether Google does.

It also matters that they might be picked up by the 'special' hidden spam filter after a spam report.

Its not about 'right and wrong', its not about absolutes, its about greater or lesser degrees of risk.

[jcoronella]

If you can think of an alternate way to do it, why bother with the risk

[jonrichd]

Thanks for the advice, and I agree 'why take the risk'. And I can think of alternate ways to do this.

I'm going to get caught between the site owner, his PR firm and the firm that designed the site, and wanted some ammunition for my views. This will help.

On the other hand, had 20 people said 'I do this all the time and it doesn't hurt', I would be more willing to stand down when the issue comes up.

[BigDave]

I personally think that it would not be considered hidden by the new hidden text filter, as it does become visible at some point.

The problem is that we just don't know yet.

The filter has only been running for a couple of months on pages that are reported using the SPAM report page. It's going to take more time and sites getting removed before we know what does/doesn't pass the new filter.

Now even though I believe that it will not drop your site for what you described, there is no way that I would risk it on my own site. And I recommend that you don't do it either. . . . unless you like being the test case;)

[markdidj]

I used the same method for my site, as I needed alot of descriptive text for each button on my percussion tutorials site.

I looked for a way to change it, and found a good method was to create a scrolling division, then inside that create your display divisions, each one being the same size as the scrolling division. This makes it only possible to see one whole division at any time. To make them appear on an event on a button use the .focus() or .scrollTop

I used focus() first but found many problems, so the scrollTop is better. if the scrolling divisions are of height 200px for example, to view the first or top, use;

document.getElementById(object).style.scrollTop=0

then for every division after use;

document.getElementById(object).style.scrollTop=200*divNumber

If you name your divisions, you can also use the anchor text method as a HTML only alternative.
Also, when people view with javascript off they see the same page, but they have to manually scroll the division. If you use this method you could put HTML links inside each division that goes to the same page as the original button. Its a good little method as it allows clients various methods of navigating your website.

Hope it helps

MarkDidj

[driesie]

This is an interesting topic actually.
What about the hidden links on 1px gif we put in a the top of the page so people visually impared people (using screenreaders ) have the navigation read out (or can skip it) at the top of the page?
This is considered good practise to make your site accessible, but is it considered spam by SEs?