SEO hidden text and AJAX • Hacker News Board

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#11

Post by colinbartlett » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:18 PM UTC

at-fates-hands wrote: post #9

This proves nothing. Sure, it indexes the text, but that has no bearing on SEO. Most people using hidden text use it as a keyword stuffing tool, stuffing more relevant keywords into the page in order to get higher page rankings. A lot of SEO techniques and how Google views them comes down to intent. It's pretty clear using hidden text and other gray and black hat methods will be picked up by Google and penalized beca…

Right, the whole article seems to prove something fairly obvious:

"So here You have it. Google can index (and indexes) hidden text and dynamically inserted text."

Then concludes the entire thing with something completely unrelated:

"If content is relavant [sic] to Your website, You won't get penalty from google."

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#12

Post by rezamoaiandin » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:20 PM UTC

You are not going to get a penalty for hidden text or trying to hide a text, you will still be indexed but that doesn't mean you will rank for what you are intending to rank for. Google is now miles better at detecting whats trying to trick it and whats not and if you try to compare these and see what ranks better the ones that are trying to hide stuff will rank much lower or wont rank for certain keywords.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#13

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:20 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#14

Post by Stormcaller » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:21 PM UTC

Ok, I think this doesn't mean much and is a flawed experiment. The test url is: https://devx.lt/en/node/9 which contains ALL the content used in this experiment. All 9 tests are done on the same page, at once.

in the 4th experiment, he searches for "site:devx.lt GetJar is an independent mobile phone app store founded in Lithuania in..." and the result is returned WITHOUT any bold text. So this was a "most relevant" result, not a "found" case. Now the problem is, these paragraphs contain same words. Google returns "LinkedIn /ˌlɪŋkt.ˈɪn/ is a business-oriented social networking service. Founded in..." because, for one it at least contains "founded" part and further the paragraph I'm sure there is more. Since the results are limited to "site:divx.lt", and paragraphs contain same words, of course all 9 tests end with "found", as it is the only page close to being relevant.

I'd like to see the same test repeated, -NOT- all tests on the same page.

Some tests return bolded results, so I consider them to be true. I think 1-2-4-5 are false positives.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#15

Post by IgorPartola » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:21 PM UTC

donmb wrote: post #3

What you did is proofing that google indexes hidden text. What you did not proof is how that impacts your ranking. Google will know that this text is hidden, although it is indexed and that is what is important.

I suspect there will always be a way to hide the text in a way that a search engine won't be able to detect. You can do this without applying any properties directly to the element containing text (raise other elements above it), hide it with JavaScript, or any number of such techniques.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#16

Post by laumars » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:22 PM UTC

melvinram wrote: post #2

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.

A few years ago it sites would get penalised for hiding tags as this was used by some -often dodgy- sites to cheat their search rankings (eg lots of hidden text about popular search items to direct people to an anti-virus scam page).

So then Google started giving heavy precedence to larger text (this also puts emphasis on titles), which lead to some CMSs having a "tag cloud" where tags are meshed together with more relevant / popular search items being in a larger font than less relevant / popular tags.

I think Google has moved on again since then and now detects if keywords appear in a natural sentence or if it's an artificial cloud of tags designed purely for SEO - but I could be wrong there. However this is the sort of detail I would have expected / hoped an article with "SEO" in the title* to comment on.

* Article's title rather than the HN submission title.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#17

Post by Ryan_Jones » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:24 PM UTC

Just because they will index it doesn't mean it won't harm your ability to rank for that text.

Google bot is a headless vesion of chrome - so while they can see that stuff, they also know when stuff isn't "visible" to the user and treat it accordingly.

The problem with tests like this is that you either need to test with site: or with made up terms - but the algorithm isn't static - it changes based on the corpus of relevant results. (e.g. if there's only 3 relevant results, then they won't apply spam penalties or panda weights, etc)

When you have such a small scale test, the corpus of results is always small - so it's not accurate.

I'm confident that if you tried these techniques on a site with content currently ranking in a highly competitive area, then changed it to one of these, your rankings would fall.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#18

Post by rezamoaiandin » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:26 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #15

donmb wrote: post #3

What you did is proofing that google indexes hidden text. What you did not proof is how that impacts your ranking. Google will know that this text is hidden, although it is indexed and that is what is important.

I suspect there will always be a way to hide the text in a way that a search engine won't be able to detect. You can do this without applying any properties directly to the element containing text (raise other elements above it), hide it with JavaScript, or any number of such techniques.

I believe Google is moving towards graphical understanding of the text as well and it should be able to render the pages and see what is going on the page... those days will soon be over and technical excellency in SEO will talk.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#19

Post by Etab » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:27 PM UTC

Is the argument that Google doesn't index hidden text, or that Google penalizes the use of hidden text?

This experiment proves what we knew -- Google indexes hidden text; however, it doesn't prove or test what people want to know -- if Google penalizes results that hide text.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#20

Post by 5h » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:29 PM UTC

Stormcaller wrote: post #14

Ok, I think this doesn't mean much and is a flawed experiment. The test url is: https://devx.lt/en/node/9 which contains ALL the content used in this experiment. All 9 tests are done on the same page, at once. in the 4th experiment, he searches for "site:devx.lt GetJar is an independent mobile phone app store founded in Lithuania in..." and the result is returned WITHOUT any bold text. So this was a "most relevant" r…

We also can't be sure that "literal searches in quotes" are considered the same way for SERP ranking etc, which I guess would be the motive for hiding text.