Display:None CSS & SEO

[BeckyKey]

Hi

A while back I was told that using the display:none tag to hide content you want minimised is bad for onpage SEO - is this the case? It's not that we want to hide it from Google, we just don't want it taking up a huge amount of space on product pages.

I have found some of these on our site, and want to know how bad they are. Is the content under the tag going to be ignored?

Thank you

[OPM]

I'm assuming your talking about content that's temporarily hidden until a users clicks on a tab or other element to reveal the content. A Google representative recently announced that this type of content is likely to get discounted as they prefer to rank sites on the content that's readily available / visible to the user. If you're depending on that "hidden" content to help you rank then it's not likely being given full credit if any at all. However if it's auxiliary content or specifications that might be considered duplicate across other sites or other pages it might not be a bad idea to keep this in place.

Here's a link to an article about this... https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hidden-tab-content-seo-19489.html

[EGOL]

Yep, content that is opened with a click does not pull long tail traffic.  It has been working that way for at least two years.

We had pages and thought that putting some details behind a click would improve the look of the pages.  Yep, it did, then the traffic flow slowly dried up.   Put that content back into the open and the traffic very slowly grew back.

[BeckyKey]

Hi

It is something I've seen discussed, but then I've seen people still doing it so I wasn't certain on the best approach.

It's quite difficult to display this content openly, on a product page/product listing page. Does anyone see a problem with displaying this content in full underneath product listings?

Thanks!

[EGOL]

We publish all of this information on product pages.   Many of our product pages have a short product description and a short article below explaining how to select, how to use, common maintenance.   We often have a video down there.  These pages rank well in the SERPs because they have generous amounts of unique, informative text, that might hold visitors.  All of this info might help some customers to buy the product.  At the same time it might discourage some customers who might have returned the product because they didn't have full information.

[BeckyKey]

I completely agree with your approach. We're starting to get videos started, for me at the moment it's resource, so I'm trying to start writing and adding this content myself.

Great to hear that it's working for you! Gives me more motivation to keep pushing forward. Thanks:)

[ATP]

@EGOL

I asked a similar question back in September and got a different response. Would you mind taking a look and commenting as i value your opinion. https://moz.com/community/q/display-none-read-more-implimentation

[EGOL]

My reply is....

When we made a couple of pages that had text revealed with a click, those pages were really really big pages, with about 5000 words total.  We just though that it would be easy for the visitor to make a short easy menu with the answers opening with a click.  It was an experiment that I had no intentions of doing other places, because I believe that text behind a click is not seen by lots of people.

So, we tried it.  Long tail traffic that was really valuable disappeared.

So, now, I put all of my text out in the open where everyone can immediately see it.

If I write text (and I write lots of it), I want it to be out there where everybody can see it.  I want them to scroll down the page, see every bit of it, whistle and say "holy smoke".