How do elements that are displayed when scrolled impact SEO?

[KendallHershey]

Hi,

We are wanting to implement Animate.css and Wowjs on our site and were concerned about the SEO impacts. Basically when the page is loaded, if the element is not within the viewport then the HTML tag (i.e. div tag) have a style="visibility: hidden" and once the element is within the viewport it will change to have style="visibility: visible".

Would having the style="visibility: hidden" negatively impact SEO?

[Sally94]

Personally, I do not have any issues with this method. It is quite similar to having content in an accordion and I see it used quite a bit on the web.
There is a minor chance that Google would not value this content as high as content shown on load. But with the mobile first index updates hidden content is becoming more acceptable.

You can consider positioning it off screen with CSS so that it is more present in the code - this is commonly used for accessibility. However, I really wouldn't be concerned with using animate.css. I don't know as much about wowjs unfortunately. See: https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/accessibilityseo-friendly-css-hiding/

[KendallHershey]

I did a little more research on the issue queue for Wowjs and found that it is indeed impacting site's SEO. See https://github.com/matthieua/WOW/issues/196 here.

Wowjs sets the element to be visibility: hidden inline and the crawler cannot see the element as evident from using Fetch as Google from Webmaster Tools. We will have to find an alternative to Wowjs so that the solution we come up with does not set the visibility: hidden property but still applies the animation.