Crawleable but hidden

[TeamacPaints]

Quick question I manage the seo campaigns for the company I work for however i need some opinions on www.teamac.co.uk I have used jquery to control a on hover div which in returns feeds more information. woudl this be seen as a problem to Google, im not trying to hide things just want to keep the homepage tidy.

any help would be appreciated

[matbennett]

There are two parts to that really: 1. Can they read it, and 2. Might they see it as manipulative

Google can certainly (and is) reading and indexing the content in that div, so technically no problem there with point 1.

Point 2 is harder to give a clear answer to. Hidden divs containing a lot of text are certainly a tactic that has in the past been used to manipulate results.  By itself I can't see it being a problem though (or even in conjunction with those slightly suspect keyword links that the jquery hides).  It depends how much you want to keep pushing that line.

I'd question how useful it is though.  You say that you are not trying to hide anything, but I can't see much other reason to take this approach.  Personally I'd focus more on making you homepage sell the product and engage users as best as possible and worry less about designing for search engines and people separately.   You could quite easily replace that hidden block with a shorter visible one that still ensured you were covering the points you want on the page, but also worked to suppose your sales message.

[TeamacPaints]

Thank you, I understand what you are saying, currently the site will be undergoing a revamp etc and I juust wanted to tidy it up somewhat to may engage the customer more towards our products rather than a big lump of text.

Definateley going to consider a shorter more keyword rich paragraph

thanks for your help