Google's Stance on "Hidden" Content

[kirmeliux]

Hi,

I'm aware Google doesn't care if you have helpful content you can hide/unhide by user interaction. I am also aware that Google frowns upon hiding content from the user for SEO purposes. We're not considering anything similar to this.

The issue is, we will be displaying only a part of our content to the user at a time.

We'll load 3 results on each page initially. These first 3 results are static, meaning on each initial page load/refresh, the same 3 results will display. However, we'll have a "Show Next 3" button which replaces the initial results with the next 3 results. This content will be preloaded in the source code so Google will know about it.

I feel like Google shouldn't have an issue with this since we're allowing the user action to cycle through all results. But I'm curious, is it an issue that the user action does NOT allow them to see all results on the page at once?

I am leaning towards no, this doesn't matter, but would like some input if possible. Thanks a lot!

[alrockn]

Sounds similar to paginate issues, and the potential to create duplicate content in the eye's of google, particularly if you're using a template.  Not a serious issue if this occurs for 1 or 2 clicks, but if viewer are going to do this for 5 or more times after the initial landing page, it might be a problem with the meta-tags.

[kirmeliux]

Hi Alrockn,

I'm not sure you understood the question. Thank you for reading.

[kirmeliux]

Anyone else want to take a crack at this?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

I don't think you're looking at a penalty situation, if that's what you are asking. Seems perfectly legitimate.

The more interesting question to me is how Google will "weigh" the hidden content in it's algorithm. I suspect that anything that is hidden by javascript (or another method) will hold less weight than text in plain sight. You could try Google's new "Fetch and Render" tool in Webmaster Tools to see how Google views the page. Anything that doesn't display might not get as much consideration as plain text.

Of course, this is a lot of speculation. We don't really know for sure how Google treats text like this, but it's a pretty common situation.