Hiding body copy with a 'read more' button

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi

Whats the consequences of hiding half of the lovingly crafted body copy/written content (good quality modern version of what we used to call seo text) i have written for a clients main site sections and then having a 'read more' button to reveal ?

I have written 500+ words for each page but client wants to reduce word count displayed since thinks looks too 'wordy'!

I know that this is possible and used to be fine if done in a manner that was still crawlable, is this still the case ?

Cheers

Dan

[danatanseo]

Hi Dan,

Yes, if you accomplish this with CSS and collapsible/expandable

tags it's totally fine. It's understandable why from a design standpoint it might be much more attractive to have a page with less words on it. Justin Taylor (@justingraphitas) actually did a bang-up job in a Mozinar on designing for SEO that discusses this exact topic: http://moz.com/webinars/designing-for-seo

Hope that helps!

Dana

[Dan-Lawrence]

many thanks Dana

[danatanseo]

You are welcome Dan!

[Kingof5]

Probably won't hurt, but won't help either. Could be seen as spammy if you ever had a manual reviewer from Google go over your site. 500+ words per page is overkill.

[Dan-Lawrence]

i thought pages needed loads of good copy 500+ words ideally ? instead of old fashioned seo text

[Kingof5]

Old fashioned SEO text would be loads of copy per page. A short paragraph explaining things for the user should be sufficient in most cases.

[Dan-Lawrence]

really !? i see it as other way round.  SEO text short an kw stuffed and currently long 3-400+ highly descriptive and good quality content copy that includes kw simply by virtue of the being descriptive and useful

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi Dana

i did tell the devs to do as you recommended (CSS divs etc) but they just replied saying they did it through javascript instead, but should be ok since on page load the text is defaulting to show. Do you think that would be ok or inadvisable to use java at all as i have also heard elsewhere ? (there has been a drop in rankings since they did this so i'm thinking not ?

All Best

Dan