: Google does not approve of "hidden content". Content that can never been seen by the user is considered spam by Google. Sites that hide text are penalized. Putting text into areas that can

@BetL925

Google does not approve of "hidden content". Content that can never been seen by the user is considered spam by Google. Sites that hide text are penalized.

Putting text into areas that can be seen by users upon mouse over or click is a gray area. There are very legitimate uses for such a technique such as menu systems. There are also html elements that make text behave this way in most browsers. For example the title element on an img tag. Google is unlikely to penalize your site for making text less visible to your users, however that text is less likely to count towards your rankings. Google puts much more weight on text the more visible it is on the page. Heading tags carry more weight than paragraph text. Even text that appears above the fold carries more weight that text that is shown in the footer. Google may not even index text in tooltips such as the text in the title attribute of an image tag.

Making text less visible will lessen its impact for the search ranking algorithms. Whether or not that hurts your rankings depends on other factors:


How much competition there is for the terms for which you are ranking
Your usage of the terms in the text that is still visible in the page
How many pages you have on your site about the keyword, and how well you cover the topic
How well you write your title tag
How many inbound links you have, what quality they are, and what their anchor text is.


Also keep in mind that more text is not necessarily better. Google has been doling out "over-optimization penalties" for keyword stuffing much more frequently in recent years. Many webmasters have improved their rankings by removing keywords from their pages. For more information on this trend, see this thread on WebmasterWorld: A close look at what over optimization really is

Vote Up Vote Down

Login to post a comment!