Static homepage content and javascript - is this technique obsolete?

[alextanner]

Hi

Apologies beforehand for any minor forum transgressions - this is my first post.

I'm redesigning my blog and I have a question re static homepage content.

It used to be common practice in the online gambling sector (and possibly others) to have a block of 'SEO copy' at the footer of the homepage.

To 'trick Google' into thinking it was directly underneath the header, web devs would use javascript to instruct the html to load the div with the SEO copy first.

The logic was that this allowed for the prime real estate of the page to be used for conversion and sales, while still having a block of relevant copy to tell the spiders what the page was about, and to provide deep links into the site.

I attended a seminar just over a year ago at which some notable SEOs said that Google had probably worked this one out but it was impossible to tell. However, I've recently noticed that Everest Poker has what I think is the code commented out, and on PokerStars I can't find it at all (even in the includes).

I would be happy to post the Everest code but, while I've read the etiquette, I'm not 100% whether this is allowed.

So my question is... for the blog I'm redesigning, do I still need to follow this practice? I would prefer search engines saw some static intro text describing the site, rather than the blog posts, the excerpts of which will probably be canonicalized to the actual post pages to avoid duplication issues. But I would prefer this static content to appear below the fold.

What is current best practice here?

Alex

[Vahe.Arabian]

Hi Alex,

In my belief, unless served as alternative content, any hidden content is unethical SEO.

Have a go at content stacking - http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/move-up-your-web-page-content-for-better-search-en.html

Hope this helps,

Vahe

[alextanner]

Hi Vahe

Thanks for the response, and the article link - I'll take a look at that later.

However, I think you've misunderstood the situation. The content is not hidden - it's clearly visible and crawlable at the bottom of the page. However, it's placed in a div and that div is loaded immediately after the header, through the use of javascript.

I'm no javascript expert but Everest Poker appears to hvae commented the function out, and PokerStars appears to have removed it altogether.

If that is, in fact, what they've done (and I'm not misreading the code, which is possible), then my question is, does this 'trick' of placing text lower in the page, but telling spiders to crawl it first no longer work.

Hope that clears things up.

Alex

[edwardlewis]

It would be possible to have the text at the beginning of the html document but then display it further down using CSS, not java script.

I don't think there is a massive need to do something like this. In the past Google may not have indexed all of the content from a page, especially if the document size was very large. This position trick would ensure that the important SEO focused content would be indexed.. if you build your site properly and take into account the size, page load speed, make sure the code is clean etc then there should be no need to move the content around.

[alextanner]

Thanks Edward