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jQuery and SEO (hidden div's)
What if I added a hidden div tag inside it some content text, does search engines look into this div?
Example:
<div style="display:none">some text</div>
It will be indexed but can be frowned upon by Google if you are hiding/showing content for SEO reasons. In other words, what Google sees should be what the user sees when clicking the link.
have a look on this discussion at google form:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/fd91a80997e531b2/e0fe0c574aa44b8d?lnk=gst&q&pli=1
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en
Hope this helps.
It depends who you ask :)
Google is pretty smart and does take CSS into account in certain ways. As far as I can tell they seem pretty good at distinguishing between genuinely useful (to the user) content that is hidden and complete spam content hidden.
Best way to get an idea of what the search engine sees is the use lynx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
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I have a client who wants a feature on his site that he has seen on a competitors. It is essentially a group of icons where, when you mouseover them, an extended tooltip appears with content, links, etc...
The tooltips are not hidden divs. The tooltip content appears nowhere in the source code of the page itself. I believe the text of the tooltips is being called from an external file (e.g. an XML file or some such thing) via javascript.
My question(s) are this:
a) since the tooltip content isn't actually on the page, does it even affect SEO efforts at all?
b) would Google consider this spam (or at best questionable)?
Many thanks!
a) since the tooltip content isn't actually on the page, does it even
affect SEO efforts at all?
It wont affect SEO efforts in the slightest
b) would Google consider this spam (or at best questionable)?
No.
I should also point out from an accesibility point of view this is pretty bad practice as well.
a) No, all content loaded from external scripts won't be considered relevant for SEO. So it's just like you don't have extra content.
If your text is in display: none or visibility: hidden , it will affect SEO but make sure that user have access to the content.
b) No because you just want to give extra information and it won't be used by Google. Google takes content as spam when it is hidden and user doesn't have access.
Let says someone has 'legitimately' hidden content within a page.
To explain this further, imagine the following:
<div id="tab-one">This is the content inside tab one</div>
<div id="tab-two">This is the content inside tab two</div>
Tab one
Tab two
From an seo perspective, assuming that none of this is done to manipulate google. And in fact, "tab two" contains spam free, relevant data, how does this impact seo?
Will googlebot index, and conciser the 'hidden' content as part of the content of the page?
Will it use this content in the same way as though the content was "visible" on the page without the use of javacscript?
Thanks.
I don't believe there's an official Google response on this topic in the past, however, from experience I can tell you that Google will index the tabbed content just fine. You'll even see SEO traffic from the content. If you're site is fairly clean, I wouldn't worry about being flagged as having "hidden content", as long as the content is accessible by user action (e.g. clicking), and obviously clickable.
However, you'll want to consider this. Say for example, some of the content in a hidden tab is a product description such as "child safe". If a users is looking for "child safe products", and they arrive at your site through a search engine, they probably won't immediate see that information because they don't know it's buried behind a tab.
Most users don't spend a lot of time hunting, so to a user they might not find the content and bounce because they don't feel like they found the relevant information they were looking for. If you subscribe to the idea that Google and Bing use search query refinements as a search signal, this could potentially "harm" your SEO.
Personally, unless it's truly tertiary information, I wouldn't put it behind a tab unless crucial to the Ux. From my experience, users don't mind scrolling if the information is relevant ... but they tend to have "tab" blindness or only really interact with "hidden" elements when it's part of the navigation or already in a transactional flow.
p.s. An alternative is to use crawlable AJAX or pushState() to have the individual tabs indexed separately on their own URLs. But you'll want to be careful ... if you're rendering out the main content on the tab "pages", you might have a duplicate content concern. If it makes sense, you can potentially use the rel="next" and rel="prev" spec that Google released (but only supported by Google right now).
In Webmaster Tools you will find the option to Fetch as Google. There you can see just how Google is crawling the page. I've noticed some JavaScript carousel libraries are crawled, while others aren't. It's just a matter of how Google is able to read the JavaScript code.
As far as impact goes, it's not like all hidden content is bad. The content is still crawled (As you will see with the fetch). Now if there was an abundance of keyword-stuffed content, that would be susceptible to penalty.
Used correctly, it's definitely still beneficial.
The hidden content will be crawled, and this is not a problem for Google, many sites have this kind of menu. I suppose the hidden tabs are not keywords stuffed and useful for the users, so you shouldn't worry about this - it is useful for the user and googlebot!
I have been researching this for a few hours and I feel that I can't decide on what is right or wrong. This was asked before on Stackoverflow, but a couple of years ago so I thought I could ask again. I want to include H1 tags on my pages but hide them, because I have graphic in my banner, but I was taught to use an H1 tag for accessibility reasons.
I discovered that this can be considered SEO spamming and can get a site blacklisted, I do not want this. It was also discovered that using H1 tags can greatly increase the sites SEO when using relative headers.
So I want to use them and hide them, for two reasons, but avoid Google blacklisting my site, is there a standard accepted method to doing this, or will I need to choose between risking blacklisting and helping those with visual disabilities a better user experience?
Thanks in advance for any advice.
The simplest method is just to include the image with an alt attribute in the h1:
<h1><img src="banner.png" alt="my banner text" /></h1>
And you can be assured that you won't be penalized for that. I have not seen any definitive information that doing image replacement will result in a higher ranking than using alt properly. Like most SEO lore, there is very little data. That said, as long as you are not trying to game the search engines and present something different to the user and the search engine, it's unlikely you'll be penalized for using image replacement.
If you do do image replacement, be sure to position the text off-screen by using absolute positioning or negative margins rather than display: none or visibility: hidden so that screen reader users can access the content.
You're not improving accessibility if you hide headings.
If you do so with display: none; or visibility:hidden;, it's as if you never added them in the first place: they won't be read by screen readers and obviously won't be displayed if CSS are enabled.
If you do so with negative text-indent or left absolute positioning, only blind people will read them but not partially-sighted people that don't use any screen reader, and they're way more than blind people (perhaps 10 times).
I have setup some dropdown menus allowing users to find pages on my website by selecting options across multiple dropdowns:
eg. Color of Car, Year
This would generate a link like: mysite.xyz/blue/2010/
The only problem is, because this link is dynamically assembled with Javascript, I've also had to assemble each possible combination from the dropdowns into a list like:
<noscript>
No javascript enabled? Here are all the links:
<a href='mysite.xyz/blue/2009/'>mysite.xyz/blue/2009/</a>
<a href='mysite.xyz/blue/2010/'>mysite.xyz/blue/2010/</a>
<a href='mysite.xyz/red/2009/'>mysite.xyz/red/2009/</a>
<a href='mysite.xyz/red/2010/'>mysite.xyz/red/2010/</a>
</noscript>
My question is, if I put these in a tag like this, will I be penalized or anything by search engines such as Google? I've already been doing so for some navigational stuff which required offsets etc. However, now I would be listing a whole list of links here too. I want to provide them here, moreso so that google can actually index my pages - but for those without javascript, they can still navigate too.
Your thoughts? Also.. even though I have some links that appear to have been indexed, I AM NOT 100% SURE, which is why I'm asking :P
If the noscript code represents an alternative to the javascript code, then it should be fine I think, but Google does try to spot fishy seo and may penalize, so it's better to avoid doing this when possible.
In your case, consider spending some time making a drop down menu such that you can have the links on the page in a list item and use javascript + css to simulate a drop down menu, this way you will not need to use the noscript tag.
A decade ago, I made my website using image links for internal navigation (this at a time when CSS was brand-new and HTML4 Transitional was normal). I then added text navigation links at the bottom of the page.
I believe this (and your idea) is a common enough technique that, as long as you really aren't trying to do something sketchy, Google et al should interpret correctly.
I think the noscript tag is irrelevant, but having a giant list of links links may make their algorithms think you're doing some fishy SEO. Like having a wall of keywords.
Google (or whoever) would index these, and as long as you're not going overboard with a bunch of BS links I don't see a problem. Though from an SEO standpoint, it's not good to create menus from javascript or flash. I might look for an alternative that uses anchor tags with some CSS to dress it up.
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What is a good invisible captcha? My site requires JavaScript so anything which requires that is fine.
Add a new input field, label it "Please leave blank", hide it using CSS, and ignore the post if that field is filled in. Something like this:
<style type='text/css'>
#other_email_label, #other_email {
display: none;
}
</style>
...
<form action='mail'>
<label id='other_email_label' for='other_email'>Please leave blank:</label>
<input type='text' name='other_email' id='other_email'>
...
</form>
So a human being won't see that field (unless they have CSS turned off, in which case they'll see the label and leave it blank) but a spam robot will fill it in. Any post with that field populated must be from a spam robot.
Here's a simple math captcha by Phil Haack. It even works with javascript disabled.
In his own words:
The way it works is that it renders
some javascript to perform a really
simple calculation and write the
answer into a hidden text field using
javascript. When the user submits the
form, we take the submitted value from
the hidden form field, combine it with
a secret salt value, and then hash the
whole thing together. We then compare
this value with the hash of the
expected answer, which is stored in a
hidden form field base64 encoded. If
javascript is disabled, then we render
out the question as text alongside a
visible text field, thus giving users
reading your site via non-javascript
browsers a chance to comment.
I've used the technique of a Display:None text box, and rejecting any submission that fills it in and had pretty good luck with that.
For what it's worth Google is rolling out 'Invisible ReCAPTCHA' (https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/comingsoon/invisible.html), I already got whitelisted with my site. At the moment implementing it, however the docs aren't that elaborated...:)
MTCaptcha is a reCaptcha alternative captcha service that supports invisible captchas similar to the recently launched reCaptcha V3, where its invisible to most users but shows a captcha if it feels the traffic is risky.
If you mean - use captcha that a human can't see as a human validation test - i think it's impossible.
This way a robot ignoring the captcha will pass for a real person! Seems like a trap for a naive spam robot.
If you want your captcha-protected site to work with clients that have no javascript - then you should hardcode it into html.
Also, if you can reliably identify trusted users (either by judgment call or by detecting some usage pattern) - you can let them post to your site without captcha.