SEO hidden text and AJAX

When hidden text and query are exact matches as well as unique, of course Google has no option but to show the only result it has.

What's important though is not that it's indexed or not. What's important is the weight that the text has on SEO ranking. I'd venture to guess that if two sites had the exact same text and one was hidden and the other wasn't, the latter would show higher in Google results.

I would say just to be safe, use the and tags with a polyfill if you need to hide and then reveal text.

It's more meaningful, and it shows that you're not trying to be deceptive. I've not tested it myself, as it is relatively new and I've not had opportunity or time yet.

edit: link to docs https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de...

Not sure who the audience is here. If the text is in the DOM, it's gonna get indexed. Computer's don't care if text is white on a white background.

That being said, Google getting dynamically generated content (ajax) is newish (I don't think it's new enough to be "news").

More interesting is if Google can "parse" things like or if the CSS hides content, or if text is too small and decide to rank based on that (contributing factors to a "quality" rating).

I'd guess "yeah, probably". After all, they can rank based on if your site is mobile-friendly, and that must take some interesting metrics to decide.

Google specifically fighting "black hat" SEO techniques is really, extremely old news. Google being good at indexing "all the things" - also old news.

Showing that it gets indexes does not show how well it would rank wrt normally visible text, though.

Isn't this something everyone already knows? Basically if its in the code it's gonna get indexed. The real issue here is how those different methods rank against other "options" with similar search results, searching specifically among your own site isn't gonna yield anything that interesting.