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SEO hidden text and AJAX

devx.lt

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Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#31

Post by nulluk »

IgorPartola wrote: post #24
rezamoaiandin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if you use custom blank fonts? Or simply detect the User Agent and serve a different CSS file?

I think its known Google can masquerade as a "normal" visitor if it suspects you of cloaking (non identifying UA string and coming from a non disclosed google crawl IP)

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en

I think they also use this to notify you in webmastertools when/if your site is hacked and is doing it to avoid detection by the normal user.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#32

Post by saalaa »

A couple of months ago, a Google engineer did an interview on this very subject where, I believe, he mentioned that text would be indexed and penalty would only be given when possible. This was interesting because obvious white text on white background would be penalized but not dynamically hidden text through Javascript because they were not able to reliably determine if the practice was intended and legitimate (a carousel for example) or malicious.

If anyone is able to find that interview, I'd be extremely thankful.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#33

Post by wooyi »

Indexing != SEO

A better test is to insert mentions to another site for relevant keywords. Then measure impact on ranking for the other site.

My guess is likely zero to negative impact (due to hidden text being penalized)

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#34

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#35

Post by eclipse31 »

For tests 7 and 8, what if the Javascript was stored in an external file, which of course is generally best practice? For 7, would the string still be parsed and indexed? For 8, would the file be downloaded and indexed? I'd be surprised!

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#36

Post by monk_e_boy »

saalaa wrote: post #32

A couple of months ago, a Google engineer did an interview on this very subject where, I believe, he mentioned that text would be indexed and penalty would only be given when possible. This was interesting because obvious white text on white background would be penalized but not dynamically hidden text through Javascript because they were not able to reliably determine if the practice was intended and legitimate (a c…

In my experience google will find and index hidden text, but this may negatively affect your ranking.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#37

Post by ricardonunez »

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.

Exactly. I see many comments here about hidden text, switching user agent, css and bunch of things that don't work anymore. The reason why we used to use that stuff was because Google used to read the whole page and use Keyword Density as one of the many ranking factors. Since those factors aren't used anymore and you can also get penalized, there's no reason to do it. Unless you want a page with just one picture and no text, but still get the benefit of the content, there's no reason to do it.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#38

Post by gildas »

I am the co-founder of SEO4Ajax and I can confirm that, everyday, I see Ajax sites which are not properly indexed on Google because their bots can't interpret JavaScript correctly, when they try to.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#39

Post by z3t4 »

I really like to not care, because I design for humans and not search engines, but the sad part is, I can't.

Startup idea: Make a search engine that make a OCR on the rendered page ...

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