Non-standard HTML tags in content

[dlindsey]

I had coded my website's article content with a non-standard tag <cnt>that surrounded other standard tags that contained the article content, I.e.</cnt>

,

. The whole text was enclosed in a div that used Schema.org markup to identify the contents of the div as the articleBody. When looking at scraped data for stories in Webmaster Tools, the content of the story was there and identified as the articleBody correctly.

It's recently been suggested by someone else that the presence of the non-standard <cnt>tags were actually making the content of the article uncrawlable by the Googlebot, this effectively rendering the content invisible. I did not believe this to be true, since the content appeared to be correctly indexed in Webmaster Tools, but for the sake of a test I agreed to removing them. In the last 6 weeks since they were removed, there have been no changes in impressions or traffic from organic search, which leads me to believe that the removal of the <cnt>tags actually had no effect, since the content was already being indexed successfully and nothing else has changed.</cnt></cnt>

My question is whether or not an encapsulating non-standard tag as I've described would actually make the content invisible to Googlebot, or if it should not have made any difference so long as the correct Schema.org markup was in place?

Thank you.

[Alick300]

Hi ,

Best way to check using fetch and render in Google search console. If you see everything is visible in result no need to worry.

Hope this helps.

Thanks