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We do that all the time in our web development. Like Alan pointed out, it all depends on intent. If you were trying to hide some keyword stuffing or anchor text links in an display:none div, well that could get you in trouble, but what you are doing is a normal and common use of display:none on the web. You have nothing to worry about.

If you're redesigning your site, why not switch to using DIVs? As far as I've read, there's no direct "penalty" for using tables, but tables to generally involve much more code to accomplish what DIV tags and CSS could do in much less code, which means your pages will load faster, which is something google takes into consideration when ranking. Not to mention that CSS layouts are much easier to customize, and can give your site a much cleaner and newer look. Chances are if you're seeing other ecommerce sites using tables they are simply using outdated shopping carts, but if you're going to take the time to redesign your site, why not do it the future-proof way using CSS?

Recently I just did a domain change of a company website, did a 301 redirect for each page and after 2 months everything were fine and keeping the same position in SERP it previously had (some even gained rank) The only thing is, the site was quite small, with around 15 links, so was a easy job to do.

If these pages have inbound links pointing to them, then combining this may give it a little kick up the rankings. Think to yourself why you'd want to include these pages under only one page. Are they not strong enough on their own? Do they have very little content etc. If so, then it would be an idea to combine them, and the others should be 301 directed (which will preserve 90-99% link juice) - Source: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/About This will also mean that you have created pages with 3x as much content on them, which will stand up to higher competition and attract more long tail searches if done well. Regards Aaron

Haha, what the??!! They're charging her for hosting and putting her in a sub directory of their own domain? Jeez, that is brazen. And they clearly must be one of those companies that profess to supply SEO but don't actually know squat about it. Tell her to fire their ass! And to ask for a refund on all her hosting payments. Tell her to tell them that all us crazies on this thread would like to throw wet kippers at them!

We haven't totally solved this problem yet.  We removed the CSS that was hiding the links but otherwise left everything the same.  Only a few of the pages shows up in the first 50 Google results for its targeted keyword and none of the pages receives very much traffic. We are still considering whether it would be better to kill the pages and 301 redirect to something more relevant, or simply noindex the pages and leave them alone. Our biggest concern is that many of these pages have a lot of links coming to them, although most of them are very low quality links.  I think are best approach is going to be trying to improve the pages that do have some rankings and eliminating the rest of the pages with 301 redirect.

Thanks, yea I can use canonicals with bigcommerce. I just wasn't sure how much the URL structure really influences the rankings of the page. Like if everything else is perfect, but there is one variable in there that isn't (ie having /categories/ in the URL) how much that would actually effect the results.

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Roger, search the Q&A system for Magento, as there have been a couple of others discussing that software and its merits. Two threads that might be of use are: http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-is-the-most-seo-friendly-ecommerce-cms-platform-available-today http://www.seomoz.org/q/need-advice-re-selecting-an-ecommerce-platform Bozzie311, I agree with Roger totally in that Wordpress and its plugins for ecommerce are often quite inadequate when it comes to an enterprise solution. On Strike Models I run Wordpress and Foxycart, and even with just a few hundred products (with many of them being nearly identical, such as ship plans for different ships) I know I'm outgrowing that solution.

thanks - i dont know why it was disabled - it probably caused another problem - we have had many!! will give reply to developer and see what he says appreciate your time

This is something we will be experimenting with in the future. For now, I think we, as SEO's should be considering HTML5 as it will be the future of the semantic web. Until people start experimenting and trying it out we won't really know and I think there is a definite divide at the moment between HTML5 developers and SEO's. Theoretically, having an explicit , <header>, <nav>etc should make it quicker and easier for SE's to parse and as we know, Google likes things that make it's spiders job easier/quicker. But this is just hypothesis at the moment.</nav> </header>

I have a client who saw big drops beginning the 11th even though they're U.S. based.  A portion of their visits come from international sources.  We're still in evaluation mode though because the site had no significant drops on the initial Panda update here in the U.S. Preliminary checks of other data show it might partially be a Panda issue, but not completely - oddly enough beginning on the 11th they also had a serious lag time in content loading due to advertiser scripts, which I'm thinking is a big factor as well. Something that I have been speculating on with several new clients is the gradual degradation concept.  My theory is many of their links coming from other sites that got hit has caused a rolling drop effect.  Since none of my longer term clients have seen any significant drop though it's a more difficult assessment.

Have you thought about incorporating video into your message. This is a great way to keep the visitor on the site and have them do what you want them to do, like fill out a form, go to another page, etc. Video combined with autoplay, works great. After seeing many tests done on autoplay, it actually works. Anyways, suggesting that you add video was a bit off topic, but I thought I'd suggest it.

Danny Dover also mentioned in his new book (Search Engine Optimization Secrets) that iframes do not get crawled. Just another source backing up Daniels answer.

Thanks Steve, this is what I thought was the best method, just wanted to hear it from another professional!

Thanks for the helpful advice guys - I appreciate it!