Hiding elements of the page

[mdeluk]

Hi,

Does hiding elements of the page have a negative effect on SEO?

The reason I ask is I am using a Wordpress theme however in options if I disable a certain element of the theme that is printed on the page it simply hides it from the user using CSS but it still exists in the code.

Could the search engine see this as bad? E.g. like you are trying to keyword stuff by hiding keywords in the page?

Thanks.

[effectdigital]

If it's text based stuff that's being hidden, or items which should be visible that are marked up with schema - then yes Google could potentially consider it to be cloaked content for the purposes of SEO manipulation. If your site has lots of SEO authority and is well trusted, something like this shouldn't be a problem. If your site is new and has a lot of convincing to do, it's just another needless negative signal being sent to Google for no reason.

In SEO, it's rare for one thing to make or break a site. People say that SEO has no 'magic-bullet' solutions, so by the same token most optimisation methods (positive or negative) must have relatively equal weighting. That means you should never ignore the small things! If you start picking and choosing which best practices to obey (or not) - you'll quickly sink yourself