Google text-only vs rendered (index and ranking)

[cpawsgo]

Hello, can someone please help answer a question about missing elements from Google's text-only cached version.
When using JavaScript to display an element which is initially styled with display:none, does Google index (and most importantly properly rank) the elements contents?

Using Google's "cache:" prefix followed by our pages url we can see the rendered cached page.

The contents of the element in question are viewable and you can read the information inside.

However, if you click the "Text-only version" link on the top-right of Google’s cached page, the element is missing and cannot be seen.

The reason for this is because the element is initially styled with display:none and then JavaScript is used to display the text once some logic is applied.

Doing a long-tail Google search for a few sentences from inside the element does find the page in the results, but I am not certain that is it being cached and ranked optimally... would updating the logic so that all the contents are not made visible by JavaScript improve our ranking or can we assume that since Google does return the page in its results that everything is proper?

Thank you!

[TomVolpe]

Hi,

Google is quite clever at distinguishing what your code does and since you can search for the sentence inside the hidden element and find the page, it is being indexed.

What you’re seeing in the Google cache is what a user without javascript enabled would see, so it’s personal choice if you think this is a problem for your site or not. But if Google thinks your site has poor usability for non-js browsers your rankings may be impacted.

There are a few things you could do if you wanted to fix this:

1. Remove the hide class from your code and have javascript add this class so only users with javascript enabled will have the content hidden from them, leaving it visible to crawlers and in your text-only cache.

2. Google recommends using

<noscript>tags to display content that is dynamically added by javascript. I know your js is not adding the content, just displaying it, but it will have the same effect in the text-only cache – your content will be visible both with and without javascript enabled.</p> <p>Hope this helps,</p> <p>Tom</p> <p> </p> <p> </p></noscript>