Does content revealed by a 'show more' button get crawled by Google?

[SEOhmygod]

I have a div on my website with around 500 words of unique content in, automatically when the page is first visited the div has a fixed height of 100px, showing a couple of hundred words and fading out to white, with a show more button, which when clicked, increases the height to show the full content.

My question is, does Google crawl the content in that div when it renders the page? Or disregard it? Its all in the source code.

Or worse, do they consider this cloaking or hidden content?

It is only there to make the site more useable for customers, so i don't want to get penalised for it.

Cheers

[LoganRay]

Google will crawl that content, but it will be devalued greatly. Any content that you find valuable to your visitors should be readily available, and preferably above the fold (which of course is not always viable). Amazon and REI both do a great job with this, the content appears to be tabbed (for reviews, descriptions, Q&A, etc), but when you click the link, it takes you further down the page via anchors.

[mememax]

this is one of the few things where google has a pretty clear statement:

"If you think a content is relevant to your users you should always make it clearly visible"

If you think about that it makes complete sense, if someone searches for a content and clicks on a result they expect to see that text, if that is hidden somewhere they won't consider that result relevant for their search, and that's what google do not want to happen.

I have to agree that the 500 words content still works for the long tail, so I would say, keep your important content at the top of the page and reference other supplementary content at the bottom or at the side but always try to make it visible.

You can see Google standing on Barry Schwartz latest article on google discounting tabbed content

As an addiitonal thing it's totally safe to hide some content on your mobile version if you've a responsive website for improving user experience, as far as that content is clearly shown in your desktop version.

hoep this helps

[becole]

Neil, the others are right--you should first show the full content and not hide any of the content on the page like you're doing. Depending on the size of the content, though, you might consider why you're hiding the content in the first place, as you might need to create more pages on your site for that content. Adding the content to new pages on the site might be good for your users, and certainly will fix your problem.

When considering the content and indexing, though, if the content is in the page source code then it will be indexed. Google does know if it's hidden, though, as Googlebot, Google's crawler, is essentially a version of Google Chrome.