Span Tags, "display:none;" --- still crawled by SE's?

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revlimiter

revlimiter

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Just wondering when content (or anything for that matter) is added in a "display:none;" span tag will it still be picked up by the Search Engines? Or would this be picked up with less value / be considered spammy by the bots?

Here is an example:
Code: 
<span style="display: none;">blah blah blah</span>
I plan on using this code with a bit of JavaScript to allow the user to "Read More >" to view the rest of the content and make it visible to the user. (So that it does not bloat my site design with loads of content). Hope this makes sense. Here is an example of what I mean in action, scroll down to the user reviews.

Thanks! I hope I can make this work and still have a SEO Friendly site! :)
 


Use it all the time to mask footer links. Indexes for sure. I always put the styles in an external css file. Just figured that would be harder to catch.
 
Yes, the bots will still see it. But just because apple does ok with it, dosen't mean that you'll have the same experience. It's pretty well known that the more "trusted" domains can get away with some things that the average joe can't. Hidden text could be one of those things in some cases.

If you use an inline style like you posted, you can bet the bots will interpret that as hidden text, it just depends on how they handle it. If it's some natural text or links, and not "spam spams spammer spamming" then you might not have any issues with it... but that is all speculation on my part.

What you can do, specify a class in an external stylesheet (as dvsf said), use that in your html, then block the bots from seeing your stylesheet in your robots.txt file. But that's a pretty plain way of being "tricky", and none of the SE's like it when you get "tricky"... so it's up to you my friend.
 
Good point that should apply to any site your going to invest any ammount of time on. You should weigh out your priorities before using any BH SEO methods. If you have spent the last 6 months writing unique content for this site its probably not worth the risk, but on the other hand if you have basically just scraped all the content anyway and put the site together in a day or so go for it.........
 
This is what I hate about this stuff. It's entirely possible to build a completely legit site using the latest dhtml techniques to make a really positive user experience, and then discover that oops, you've been blacklisted because the search engine thinks you're doing something sneaky, when in fact you're just hiding text to be used for popup help or dynamic menus or something.

Here's one solution though: If you need to hide a block of text that you want to display later, use AJAX to pull the text off your server as needed, then you don't have to worry about any shit from the search engines.
 
waz67 said:
This is what I hate about this stuff. It's entirely possible to build a completely legit site using the latest dhtml techniques to make a really positive user experience, and then discover that oops, you've been blacklisted because the search engine thinks you're doing something sneaky, when in fact you're just hiding text to be used for popup help or dynamic menus or something.
Click to expand...
bah, that's just paranoia
nobody ever got blacklisted for doing a display: none on their menu or popup

people worry too much about this. you obviously shouldnt hide whole pages of content and links, but a paragraph here and there isn't going to get you in trouble
 
stanley said:
bah, that's just paranoia
nobody ever got blacklisted for doing a display: none on their menu or popup

people worry too much about this. you obviously shouldnt hide whole pages of content and links, but a paragraph here and there isn't going to get you in trouble
Click to expand...
I agree with stanley here. When BH became mainstream people got really paranoid about bans and blacklists. There's almost always a legit reason why someone might use something. Like cloaking.. you could always be changing your content based on user's country to show them relevant information. Big companies do this all the time. Then you can do BH cloaking and that's bot only cloaking and will get you banned if you get caught.

How to see the difference between legit cloaking and BH cloaking.. that's a pickle for you.
 
stanley said:
bah, that's just paranoia
nobody ever got blacklisted for doing a display: none on their menu or popup

people worry too much about this. you obviously shouldnt hide whole pages of content and links, but a paragraph here and there isn't going to get you in trouble
Click to expand...

In my case it was more than just menus, I had over a thousand words of popup help text that had me worried.
 
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