Can DIVS that look like frames hurt?
-
We are working with a site that has what appears to be a frame in the middle but it is not targeting a new html page it is just a div hiding content until you use the scroll bar.
What are best practices for working with this?
-
The answer is... it depends.
In general, Google doesn't like hidden content - but search engines won't penalize you for it unless they find that the hidden content is meant to deceive. In this case it doesn't sound like it's meant to deceive, but there are a few things to check to make sure the content is being indexed properly.
1. Does the content require javascript or flash to become visible? If so, it's possible for search engines to disregard it.
2. While it's common to place content in divs with CSS attributes set to 'hidden' (for usability purposes) and it's common for Google to index this content, it's hard to say how much seach engines will "weight" this content in it's ranking algorithms.
3. Check Google's cache of the page, and click the text-only link (for example, here's Google's text-only cache of this page. Is there any text visible that's not visible to the user under normal circumstances? This text may not be treated the same way by search engines as completely visible text.
Best practice is to view your site with javascript disabled (you can do this with the MozBar) and make sure everything is visible. If not, you may want to make sure everything degrades gracefully to ensure maximum accessibility, and maximum indexation by search engines.
-
Hello,
Hidden Divs or interactive content is okay as long as its there for enhancing the user experience. A good example would be a thumbnail image, upon click or rollover the image enlarges with some text describing the picture. A bad example would be a highlighted word when rolled over provides an tool tip with an ad or keyword spam in it.
Always design with User experience as a priority, then Search Engine. What you will find is that the more people who enjoy and talk about your site, the better the search engines will rank your site. That is how it is suppose to work, search engines want to return the most relative and best website for every query they receive, by focusing on the user first your are in essence doing SEO.
Hope that helps,
Don
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can I have my blog on http and the rest of the site on https?
I have an ecommerce site that is on https. We have a Wordpress blog for blogging, but we also have our help section located on it. I used a plugin to switch the blog to https but now have a few problems. 1. My sitemap generator still shows the blog as http and Google gives me a warning for the redirect. 2. When trying to use the Moz page grader I was told that I was in a redirect loop. 3. The pages do not seem to be getting indexed. It is a blog so there is never any information exchanged that is private. Would I be ok with just switching it to http? Or would Google see that as two different sites even though they have the same domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Some site's links look different on google search. For example Games.com › Flash games › Decoration games How can we do our url's like this?
For example Games.com › Flash games › Decoration games How can we do our url's like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lutfigunduz0 -
Google can't access/crawl my site!
Hi I'm dealing with this problem for a few days. In fact i didn't realize it was this serious until today when i saw most of my site "de-indexed" and losing most of the rankings. [URL Errors: 1st photo] 8/21/14 there were only 42 errors but in 8/22/14 this number went to 272 and it just keeps going up. The site i'm talking about is gazetaexpress.com (media news, custom cms) with lot's of pages. After i did some research i came to the conclusion that the problem is to the firewall, who might have blocked google bots from accessing the site. But the server administrator is saying that this isn't true and no google bots have been blocked. Also when i go to WMT, and try to Fetch as Google the site, this is what i get: [Fetch as Google: 2nd photo] From more than 60 tries, 2-3 times it showed Complete (and this only to homepage, never to articles). What can be the problem? Can i get Google to crawl properly my site and is there a chance that i will lose my previous rankings? Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | granitgash
Granit FvhvDVR.png dKx3m1O.png0 -
Can a large fluctuation of links cause traffic loss?
I've been asked to look at a site that has lost 70/80% if their search traffic. This happened suddenly around the 17th April. Traffic dropped off over a couple of days and then flat-lined over the next couple of weeks. The screenshot attached, shows the impressions/clicks reported in GWT. When I investigated I found: There had been no changes/updates to the site in question There were no messages in GWT indicating a manual penalty The number of pages indexed shows no significant change There are no particular trends in keywords/queries affected (they all were.) I did discover that ahrefs.com showed that a large number of links were reported lost on the 17th April. (17k links from 1 domain). These links reappeared around the 26th/27th April. But traffic shows no sign of any recovery. The links in question were from a single development server (that shouldn't have been indexed in the first place, but that's another matter.) Is it possible that these links were, maybe artificially, boosting the authority of the affected site? Has the sudden fluctuation in such a large number of links caused the site to trip an algorithmic penalty (penguin?) Without going into too much detail as I'm bound by client confidentiality - The affected site is really a large database and the links pointing to it are generated by a half dozen or so article based sister sites based on how the articles are tagged. The links point to dynamically generated content based on the url. The site does provide a useful/valuable service/purpose - it's not trying to "game the system" in order to rank. That doesn't mean to say that it hasn't been performing better in search than it should have been. This means that the affected site has ~900,000 links pointing to is that are the names of different "entities". Any thoughts/insights would be appreciated. I've expresses a pessimistic outlook to the client, but as you can imaging they are confused and concerned. LVSceCN.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DougRoberts0 -
Does Google only look at LSI per page or context of the Site?
From what I have read i should optimise each page for a keyword/phrase, however, I read recently that google may also look at the context of the site to see if there are other similar words. For example i have different pages optimised for Funeral Planning, funeral plans, funeral plan costs, compare funeral plans, why buy a funeral plan, paying for a funeral, prepaid funeral plans. Is this the best strategy when the words/phrases are so close or should i go for longer pages with the variations on one page or at least less pages? Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Divs Vs Table for styled data\
Hello, We're in the process of launching MultipleSclerosis.net and are a bit confused with how to present some specific information. Looking at pages such as http://multiplesclerosis.net/symptoms/, http://multiplesclerosis.net/what-is-ms/courses-patterns/ and http://multiplesclerosis.net/treatment/prescription-nonprescription-medications/ is it better to keep this data structured as divs, and style them as tables or to keep them as tables and style them accordingly. Though not technically "tabular" data, i'm not too sure how to handle this. The text to code ratio is quite high with the divs in the markup, which though i'm not overly worried about, it could cause some issues with the site's indexability. Thanks I appreciate any feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OlivierChateau0 -
Can you appear in both Google local and universal results on the page?
I have a client that ranks 2nd for a google local result, and the local results are the first set of results being displayed, making it in fact the 2nd result on the page for the keyword. There aren't any blended results on this page, it's straightforward local results, then universal results directly after. They are concerned that they are not appearing in the universal results high enough (they're on page 5 with a different url than the homepage). I'm not sure why their #2 local ranking isn't good enough since those are consistently the same results, but I have to ask; Can you appear in both local and universal results on the same page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0