Okay to have text in javascript?

[cakelady]

There are so many conflicting opinions out there, one of which I recently read indicated that if you are putting your keywords in javascript, the new google update would have an issue with this.

If you want to keep a page clean looking and have visitors click to read more text, is the opinion here that this is okay or an issue? The main purpose of adding text in javascript would be to have enough content on the page without making it look cluttered.

Webmaster tools says that when you have hidden text in javascript, the same content should be placed in a no script tag?

Thanks.

[Matthew_Edgar]

What I've found is that it is okay to have text in JavaScript and Google/Bing will probably index that content if the JavaScript is not too complex. I've seen it not index more intense JavaScript or scripts that require user interaction. You can put alternative text in noscript tags and that seems to work okay.

Typically though, I recommend putting the super important optimized text in regular old HTML instead of JavaScript. That way you are 100% certain that Google/Bing can crawl and index that content. Plus, it is typically easier to manage content in HTML.

However, what you said about the clutter makes it sound like your JavaScript is adding effects to text already in the HTML. Is that the case? For example, you have a div on your page that contains some text. By default, it has the style attribute "display:none;". When a user clicks or takes some action, you change that display attribute to shows previously hidden text. Is that what you are doing?

If that is what you are doing, or something like that, then you have text in HTML not JavaScript. One easy way to check this is to disable CSS and JavaScript then load your page. You want to make sure you can see the content you want Google/Bing to index.

[cakelady]

The client wants to remove existing content to create a cleaner look on the page. I suggested we find a way to keep that content to avoid losing the traffic it generates and turning the page into a low quality page. My thought was to display a portion of the content and have the visitor click to view the rest.