Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

I suppose every Web 2.0 designer should know the answer to this question but admittedly I did not. We’re working on a redesign for one of our outdoor sites and the design calls for some of the content to be placed in a show/hide div to keep the page neat. I wasn’t sure if this would be a good idea from an SEO perspective so I decided to run a test.

I created a simple page with a medium amount of text visible and outside any hidden divs. I also placed more text within a div containing my target keyword that was set to display: none. This particular page did not contain the requisite javascript link to show/hide the div but I didn’t care - this page wasn’t for users, it was for search engines.

The result: within a week the page was indexed by Google and the hidden div text was picked up along with our target keyword. This is a useful finding for two reasons. First, it means unscrupulous publishers can place unrelated text on a page and keep it completely hidden from users while search engines slurp up the illegitimate content. But it also means that if, for design reasons, you need to place some of your content in a show/hide div arrangement the content is still visible to Google. Our test page hasn’t been picked up by Yahoo! yet but we’ll keep you posted if/when it does.

As with all search engine optimization knowledge, we hope you use this tip for good and not evil

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 7:58 am and is filed under Search engine ranking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.