Display: none
-
A prominent SEO consultant recently told me that using display:none in the css is still a bad idea. We built a simple drop down menu using widely used jquery techniques and it uses display:none to slideToggle the menu.
Does anyone else think this is a bad idea? If so, how should I change it since just about every jquery drop down I come across uses the slideToggle/display:none.
-
I'd suggest checking that any jquery solution hides stuff with display:none after the page has loaded. Essentially is the content/menu fully visible when you turn javascript off and load the page? (regardless of how horrific the display looks?)
Bear in mind that Google also advises against things like display:none for implementation of things like microformats.
-
Using display:none is fine. There's JavaScript on the page that will make those items display when the users takes some action on the menu. Google has some way of reading the JavaScript to see what may be displayed, and at this point, I'm sure they're very good at detecting these types of menus. I don't think you can't make a menu like that without using it, and tons of sites use them.
Obviously, you shouldn't use display:none to cloak text on the page, when no user action can get that text to be displayed.
-
Conventional wisdom says this is a bad idea because its a technique used by black-hats to stuff keywords into their documents. See:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-unwise-comments/
However, for JQuery and things like menu's and screen reader links, Google appears to know the difference. See:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=50f9a4942ac605ec&hl=en
The takeaway is you can use this, and its unlikely to get your site penalized. But be careful that what you're doing is both (a) common practice and (b) couldn't get caught in a spam finding algorithm. If you are in MLM or pharmaceuticals or something that often gets associated with spam, you'll want to avoid using these techniques. If there's no way your site could be considered spam and you're using display:none legitimately, then you'll be safe.
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
-
Google displays multiple titles for same article. What does this mean?
I've linked to some screenshots so that it what I'm talking about makes more sense. Sometimes, when I perform a search, I see an article with the correct article title listed as the page title in the SERPs. Other times, I see the wrong page title – it's a generic somethin' or other done by my client's web design company with a bunch of keywords thrown in. The latter (not the correct article title) also appears at the top of the browser tab for every article on my client's site. I know this is bad, but what can be done about it? This would never happen if my client used Wordpress or some easily modifiable CMS, but they're using a proprietary one maintained by the group that designed the website. open?id=0BxB_dYL1ylGgVVF1dHlwdXp2dFU open?id=0BxB_dYL1ylGgdWJjdlJoRlRIR00
Technical SEO | | Greenery0 -
GWT Fetch & Render displays desktop version of site as mobile
Hi team, I noticed that when I request a desktop rendering in GWT using fetch and render, pages render as the mobile version. Screenshot attached. It's related to the VHS units in our CSS (as far as I'm aware). Does anyone know what the implications of this may be? Does it mean googlebot can only see the mobile version of our website? Any help is appreciated. Jake jgScJ
Technical SEO | | Jacobsheehan0 -
Accessibility / display none
Hello, Does anyone ever had a problem with display none portion of a page made for accessibility? (Jaws reader/ NVDA) Thank You.
Technical SEO | | Vale70 -
Google and responsive content in display:none CSS
I’m building a WordPress site with Visual Composer and I’ve hit a point where I need to show a totally different section on a mobile compared to a desktop/tablet. My issue/question comes from the fact that both mobile and desktop rows will have the same content as well as H1/H2/H3 tags. From inspecting the elements I see the mobile only rows are hidden until the page size shrinks through being set to 'display: none' in the CSS (standard visual composer way of handling width & responsiveness) How will Google see this in terms of SEO? I don’t want to come across as if I’m cloaking text and H1 tags on the page (I have emailed the visual composer support but wanted to get an external opinion)
Technical SEO | | shloy23-2945840 -
How to display the full structure of website on Google serps
I have been searching around but unable to gather information as to how we can control or list top pages of a website on Google's first page , i.e. if we type seomoz in google , we can see the main listing with 6 subdomain listings , which link to Blog , Seo tool , Beginner Seo guide , Learn Seo , Pricing & Plans and login My question is can we control these listings i.e. what to display and what not , and if yes how can we make this type of visibility on first page , by using html or xml sitemaps or theirs something mostly websites are missing. Cause this type of data is coming up for very less websites and mostly websites are with single urls. c43Ki.jpg
Technical SEO | | ngupta10 -
Change in how Google displays SERPs
Hi All, Recently our SERPs have changed in Google results to show product prices from our pages rather than the meta description. This just started to happen in November with no change (that we know of) on our side. I have attached a from and to SERP image if that helps. Does any one have any ideas as its starting to effect our rankings? Thanks, Tony. Tkeou,6jg6Q Tkeou,6jg6Q#1
Technical SEO | | tstauntonwri0 -
Advice on display this content on my page for search engines
Hi, my website http://www.in2town.co.uk/Holiday-News is about bringing travel and holiday news to our readers of our lifestyle magazine but i am having problems at the moment with the layout. What i mean by this is, i have written content on the page as an introduction so google knows what this section of the site is about but to be honest it looks rubbish with having the introduction there and i would like to know if i am doing the right thing by having the content there for google to know what my site is about. I have tried taking it away and noticed i dropped in the rankings and when i have put it back up i go up in the rankings, can anyone please give me some advice over this issue
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Homepage display for seo
hi, Which is the best , seo speaking, about the homepage display with a CMS (joomla here). 1/ To display articles as "blog" and thus articles are always recent but not the same (chronological).. 2/ To display always a same article (just 1) but updated sometimes to times ? 3/ Both of them are good ? Tks a lot in advance..
Technical SEO | | mozllo0