CSS Display None / Hidden? Will I get in Trouble?

[sophia123]

Hi, We're integrating over a dozen of videos to the site to be featured in a slideshow manner.

A selected video will be featured in the center of the page, meanwhile the user can click on the small thumbnails and change it to something else.

For the selected videos, there will be a transcript shown right next to the video.

The trick is, we cant show the transcripts for all the videos at once, since that's just bad user experience - the page will be miles long.

We want to hide the transcripts for the videos which are not shown either in a div - or in some other Google friendly manner.

The question is? Is this Google - legit? Is there a chance of being flagged, since so much content will be hidden?

[sophia123]

Hi,

Sorry, to actually rephrase the question - will the page / site be given proper credit for that content? I know that Google will index it, and find within the quotations, but do you know if it will somehow take away the weight of that content since it is hidden? Will it show up if similar queries are searched?

[MikeRoberts]

We use CSS Hidden content behind a clickable "Read More" on  pretty much all of our sites in places where we want certain things viewable above the fold (mainly for aesthetic reasons). We've never seen any issues with Google not giving proper weight to the hidden content or flagging it as cloaking.

In your case though, I'd be concerned that having the transcripts for 12+ videos hidden on one page will make it less likely that each video will be found as easily as they should have. E.G. A video that would be perfectly relevant to a search may not appear in the SERPs for relevant terms because it is overshadowed by one or more of the other 12+ video transcripts. IMO, It might be more search-friendly and user-friendly to instead have a hub page linking out to the individual pages hosting the video and its related content.

[PhilNottingham]

As long as all the text content is visible in the HTML and is accessible for users - then you'll be absolutely fine.

The CSS Display none method is normally a good solution.

However... for numerous reasons I agree with Mike that you shouldn't have all the videos and transcripts on a single page. Have you looked at possibly using HTML5 pushState as an alternative solution?

[sophia123]

Hey,

I think I answered the question.

Go to this page: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Click on any of the tabs. Scroll a little bit and select a sentence and search for it on Google  You will see that Google gives the right URL, however it doesn't highlight the text on SERPs.

I do believe there is less weight given in that case, since google doesnt even seem to highlight the sentence  In the case of long tail keywords, it will pick the destination that delivers the intent right away. In the case of hidden / non visible divs, there are more steps required to get there.