Drupal SEO - Concerns about cloaking

[Tinhat]

It appears that core Drupal includes a CSS style that automatically generates an

tag for any* or

> ## Main menu

This uses the CSS to create a 1px1px header with that text that is absolutely positioned in the top left hand corner. Essentially, hidden and unreadable to humans and presumably also useless to even screen readers.

There is some discussion of the reasoning for including this functionality as standard here:

[http://drupal.org/node/1392510](http://drupal.org/node/1392510 "http://drupal.org/node/1392510")

I'm not convinced of its use/validity/helpfulness from an SEO perspective so there's a few questions that arise out of this.

1.  Is there a valid non-SEO reason for leaving this as the default rather than giving ourselves full control over our

    ## tags?

2.  Could this be seen as cloaking by creating hidden/invisible elements that are used by the search engines as ranking factors?

Update:

http://www.seobythesea.com/2013/03/google-invisible-text-hidden-links/

Google's latest patent appears to deal with this topic. The patent document even makes explicit reference to the practice of hiding text in

## tags that are invisible to users and are not proper headings.

Anyone have any thoughts on what SEOs using Drupal should be doing about this?

[CoreyNorthcutt]

These topics are always a little subjective, but here's what I'm seeing.

1. Screen readers (used by the blind) do like 'H tags'.  And Google does give preference to sites better that are more likely to be handicap accessible.  From what I see, this isn't an ideal use though.  For example, if you can end up with 200 x H2 tags on a page, I'd say this is wrong.

Keywords placed in 'H tags' are also given more weight in a page's ranking.  So, if the # of H tags is abused, and your page provides near nothing but H2's, it's not unreasonable to suspect that Google thinks you're stuffing keywords into the second-most powerful tag that can go into .   It seems that Google does more to go after these kinds of possibly manipulative practices than they do to award the positive:  far more often people shoot themselves in the foot.  And this seems to, at very least, make that a lot easier to do.  A page should generally have a single H1 at the start, and a small handful of relevant headings marked H2 - H6.

2. I'd again be a little wary.  Text in the source that's not visible to the user is the definition of cloaking.  As AJAX has gotten more popular, you do see more prestigious sites hiding content with JavaScript, and very slowly (that is, much slower than mainstream development), Google seems to adapt to these kinds of evolutions.  But hiding everything by default in a CSS class?  I'd personally avoid that, and if I saw it on a client's site, it would sit high on my list of things to tweak and test.

Hope something solid gets sorted, and then extensively A/B tested in production.  Drupal is a good application; it still blows my mind that people still need to write SEO plugins / hacks for literally every application out there.   It gives us SEO's a little more job security that these technical problems are almost never fully tackled at the source.

[Tinhat]

Thanks Corey.

It's certainly something that had us a bit worried.

The maximum number of hidden H2s on our Drupal pages is something like 2-3, and in each case the H2 serves to provide a description for the following ul/ol HTML tags (which it can be argued is just good semantic markup). If this is the case, could it still be penalised for cloaking? Essentially, is cloaking seen as an absolute practice in the eyes of the Search Engines or is it more subjective? Is a site penalised for appearing to use cloaking methods in a black and white sense and in lines with certain criteria or do they rate this by degrees?

(I realise they are questions we might not be in a position to know the answer to.)

I'm still in two minds about seemingly wasting 2-3 H tags by having them wrap around "main menu" content on seemingly every page. As it stands, they are automatically generated around our breadcrumb and our main menu buttons at the top of the page and are used to simply describe the menus on the page.

My worry is that even if this is not having a negative impact re: cloaking it is still a waste of H2 tags. If we have these 2-3 just describing the menus (that are global) and a further 1-2 describing the actual content of the page, then this is not really ideal from an SEO point of view.

In our case, I wonder if it might be worth sacrificing semantic structure for the SEO benefit?

Thanks.

[mikeusry]

I was really concerned when I started developing in Drupal 7 and noticed that many themes had this programmed in.

Although I have not performed any specific split test on taking this out I had not noticed any misfortunes or penalties by having it in the template as you have stated.  I also crawl my sites many times over with different tools and I have not received warnings etc.

Nonetheless I moved over to the Omega Theme, which is responsive, and the semantic programming is much better for my taste.

[Tinhat]

Thanks Mike.

We're going to run with it for a while on one of our sites and see how it performs. I'll try and post any meaningful results here at a later date.