: Does a large (hidden) submenu count towards site content in tems of determining page similarities? Basically, I have this site that recently lost a lot of traffic after I optimized the html,

@Angela700

There's several elements to your question which have been asked here before:


As far as I know, Google ignores invisible material and the submenus are only visible when hovered over. Has anything at all changed in this area?


Google parses the content inside your HTML, so it can see all content that is manipulated by the DOM using CSS (Hide/show/toggle/hover) etc. Rudimentary JavaScript can also be executed by Google as well. To get an idea of what Google "sees" when parsing your page, try the Google Preview tool (when your page is indexed) or the "fetch as Google" tool inside Google Webmaster Tools.


If I ajax in the submenus, leaving only the main eight menu items to load, will I be punished for "hiding" information?


See this answer regarding Ajax & SEO


Is the idea worth testing or is it frankly retarded?


Probably neither - you want to look into how Google can determine boilerplate text on a web-page to determine what area is "content" and what isn't (Header, Nav, Sidebar, Footer etc). Validate this by looking at other large, well known sites that operate similar to yours with large menus, and you'll see that your concerns aren't really worth too much thought.

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