Hidden Text - Opinions?

Hi All, need quick straw poll. Do you guys (and gals) think that hiding chunks of text for design purposes using CSS is bad for SEO? Especially considering the keywords will only be in the non-visible text (with a read more link to expand and make the full text visible)

I know google says it is but any experience with this at all?

If you feel that it enhances the user expierence, its worth it. try running some AB tests to see if theres much a difference

This is generally acceptable, it will be obvious if used purely for content density purposes though so just do not taunt the angry google gods and you'll fine

I was under the impression that hidden content that is not rendered by default is given less weight by Google. Just wondering if anyone tested this and actually know the answer?

I read it somewhere its not a good idea, i am not technical guy when its about css and languages, do your search on hidden text in Google before using it.

From an SEO standpoint, its not the best idea, but if the trade-off is a highly enhanced user experience then it can be worth it.

As far as SEO goes, its a roll of the dice as to whether that content is both crawled and considered as part of the main text of the page (i.e. whether or not it gets calculated into the ranking algo for the page). So even with the content crawled it is not necessarily going to contribute to the "on page" text as it relates to ranking signals.

Google has not provided much clarification as to "how" they make this determination other than by means of a manual review (which in reality most sites don't get...or get every once in a blue moon).

Across our managed network over over 15,000 sites we haven't yet been able to find any clear cut evidence that is a smoking gun in either direction. As of now, it appears to follow much of the same random logic as JavaScript on page as it relates to Goog's crawlers...meaning that it sometimes IS and sometimes ISN'T readable by spiders.

Regards,

im not 100% sure about hidden anchors, whether they pass the same power or not. however text is crawled fine and there are no penalties for it.


for example i ranked a website for many kws (to position #3 due to bounce rate and user signals) with hidden text about game hacks. text about hacks isnt visible, but google crawlers understand the page is about game hacks. Game hacks are extremaly bannable niche so I just have a game review as a visible text.

Result? for a viewer i just have a gaming review website, but it ranks for all the queries with hacks.

Found this https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/hidden-text-experiment/