How not to hide text

[DrFooBarson]

Thanks, Matt!  Too funny.

[leonjollans]

Just display your keywords on the page for goodness sake. use a tagcloud or some kind of similar excuse to render it. If you're hiding text for search engines at all, you're clearly trying to trick them, and ultimately if that's what you're doing, you deserve to be down-listed from my point of view as just some dude searching for information.

[achshar]

damn... that first method is hilarious!

[onesmartgal]

I am looking for an answer on why in this last week I can only see "old comments" under videos? For example, all I can see for this one is "10 months ago" as they are "Highest Rated Comments". I don't want highest rated comments I want to see the newest comments posted chronologically. I cannot find any answers. Help!

[Eruonen]

I have text that is hidden unless certain conditions are met on the user's part (It will show up in a lightbox if users are using a certain browser). Is it possible that the Googlebot misinterprets this as deceiving the search engine?

[quebecclimber]

What is the best way to hide a sub-menu wich I want to be only visible when an item in the main menu is in hover state without being penalised?

[Snemelk]

I'd say there's no problem hiding 'good' text. I guess the developer from the example tried to hide some extra keywords with this trick.

And in any case: Use unordered lists and CSS to build your (sub)menus. Even IE understands :hover on A elements.

[neha1210]

You have mentioned that Google "parses some code and executes some javascript".

What I would like to understand is that does Google index content that is generated from Javascript ?

[svivian]

I'm interested to know how Google handles this kind of text hiding versus, say, tabulated content. Does Google somehow check if it's possible for the hidden content to eventually be displayed (i.e. on a user click?)

[FeedtheDragon]

I see a lot of WordPress themes that give the heading a negative text-indent of -999 in order to drop in a linked logo image instead. Does something of this nature have a bad impact on SEO?

[otplanet666]

@FeedtheDragon i have the same doubt

[anevelos]

That is too funny! Would be less work to actually develop text that would work for the engines AND people browsing the site.

[larssonk22]

wow whoever wrote that code is bloody smart, but obviously not smart enough!

[mrcakey]

The title of the video implies that there's a "good way" to hide text. I thought hidden text was just a big spanky no-no full stop?

[adithecool]

I can understand JavaScript cloaking as being wrong but what I would really had liked to know was if its bad to hide text using CSS like {display:none;} or {text-

indent:-9999px;}

Most of the time these techniques are used by web designers to hide text and replace by images (for example to show some fancy font, etc).

[Wetchman]

We are a web design/development shop and don't believe in adding the "site design by" link to the bottom of our client sites, but we've put the standard link in the footer of some sites with a "display:none" applied to it. Will this hurt us or our client sites with Google? We're not trying to trick Googlebot, just add our "credit" without displaying it to the user.

[iohin]

good question. I would like to know the answer too.

[traxdata2k]

How about adding it as meta data?

[svivian]

If you want to hide your credit then use either a standard comment or maybe an author/copyright/generator meta tag. Hiding text, particularly links, is not gonna do you any favours.

[kevinargh]

I always wonder how google will treat hidden movie spoilers that only appear if you mouse hover. I assume it would raise flags and someone at google would have to manually check it?

[daveshacket]

Matt, I'm loving these videos. Thank you. This one needs some follow up though. There are very valid reasons to hide text. For example, creating a lengthy page with headings and then clicking on a heading expands more content for that topic. Or creating a menu system that expands and collapses. It always does concern me that Google might think I'm hiding something (in a bad way). Will this hurt SEO? Is there a way of coding something like that which is better than others?

[nphinternational]

Dave, I was just hoping the same thing: that Google doesn't think I am hiding something from the bot just because I hide some text. Like you said, it is very handy to hide texts on a lengthy page, and show texts depending on user interaction.

[abigoroth]

I did not understand why they need to hid the text ?

[SEOLEX]

Hey Matt

If Google does not like hidden text how come that 8 spam reports over 9 month on the same site has absolutely no effect? Can we really trust Google when you say, that hidden text is not OK?