Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SEO hidden text and AJAX

devx.lt

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 52 posts

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#41

Post by primaryobjects »

I was concerned about this when recently releasing a meteor.js site, whether Google would index the pages and content.

Meteor serves pages as a single-page-application (same as AngularJs and other ajax frameworks), so if you simply view the source of the home page, you'll see mostly empty HTML. I didn't add any extra modules for SEO and simply published the site.

It looks like Google has indeed indexed the pages and text https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#42

Post by richardbaxter »

Hm. "Found" does not mean "OK". If this were a serious, site wide proposition in a competitive vertical on a high ranking domain, you'd be risking everything going down this route.

A much nicer way to solve the problem I think these tests are trying to address is to implement pre-rendering of your ajax pages. Take a look at something like prerender.io.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#43

Post by gildas »

Ryan_Jones wrote: post #17

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…

> Google bot is a headless vesion of chrome

I highly doubt this is the case, what is your source?

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#44

Post by mikewhy »

primaryobjects wrote: post #41

I was concerned about this when recently releasing a meteor.js site, whether Google would index the pages and content. Meteor serves pages as a single-page-application (same as AngularJs and other ajax frameworks), so if you simply view the source of the home page, you'll see mostly empty HTML. I didn't add any extra modules for SEO and simply published the site. It looks like Google has indeed indexed the pages and…

GoogleBot has understood JavaScript for years. Their mobile page tester is proof of this fact.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#45

Post by Ryan_Jones »

gildas wrote: post #43
Ryan_Jones wrote: post #17

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…

> Google bot is a headless vesion of chrome I highly doubt this is the case, what is your source?

Everything Google has said that the bot does, plus a knowledge of coding. They aren't using a LYNX style browser to render javascript and determine the position of ads on pages. They have to be using a headless type of actual browser for that - and it's a safe bet they aren't using firefox or IE or safari.

They aren't telling us how Googlebot is coded, but it's pretty easy to deduce.

http://ipullrank.com/googlebot-is-chrome/ for more details

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#46

Post by lloyddobbler »

colinbartlett wrote: post #11
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."

Well-said.

As another commenter put it, Indexing != SEO. Google has for years been quite dedicated to sniffing out webspam and penalizing those who use black hat techniques.

You can't hack SEO. It may lead to some temporary gains - but inevitably the house of cards will crumble, and you'll find yourself having burned the domain you built with penalties.

TL;DR - If you hide something on a page, you may in fact be indexed. But in terms of rankings, your content will likely wind up on page 9,743 of the SERPs.

From the horse's mouth: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66353

Thanks to the OP for the original article, though - I'm giving a talk on 'SEO for Developers' next month, and this is a great example of false conclusions and how NOT to approach SEO.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#47

Post by lloyddobbler »

leni536 wrote: post #27
IgorPartola wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or detect the user agent and simply serve different content? I'm pretty sure that Google penalties this though.

Yep. Here you go: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355

Here's the full "Don't do this sh!t" article from Google: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769#quality_g...

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#48

Post by gildas »

Ryan_Jones wrote: post #45
gildas wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google bot is a headless vesion of chrome I highly doubt this is the case, what is your source?

Everything Google has said that the bot does, plus a knowledge of coding. They aren't using a LYNX style browser to render javascript and determine the position of ads on pages. They have to be using a headless type of actual browser for that - and it's a safe bet they aren't using firefox or IE or safari. They aren't telling us how Googlebot is coded, but it's pretty easy to deduce. http://ipullrank.com/googlebot-is…

> but it's pretty easy to deduce.

Indeed, I would try to make bots display the value window.chrome to verify this assertion.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#49

Post by Ryan_Jones »

gildas wrote: post #48
Ryan_Jones wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything Google has said that the bot does, plus a knowledge of coding. They aren't using a LYNX style browser to render javascript and determine the position of ads on pages. They have to be using a headless type of actual browser for that - and it's a safe bet they aren't using firefox or IE or safari. They aren't telling us how Googlebot is coded, but it's pretty easy to deduce. http://ipullrank.com/googlebot-is…

> but it's pretty easy to deduce. Indeed, I would try to make bots display the value window.chrome to verify this assertion.

They wouldn't identify as chrome - it'd still be a custom browser based on the chrome code.

Re: SEO hidden text and AJAX

#50

Post by WalterGR »

fideloper wrote: post #6

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 (contri…

    Google getting dynamically generated content (ajax) is newish
    (I don't think it's new enough to be "news").
They've been doing it for years.

    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).
Signs point to Googlebot using a browser, so it doesn't need to "parse" things, per se. It just loads the page and checks what happens.

    Google specifically fighting "black hat" SEO techniques is really,
    extremely old news.
I have a slang dictionary website. It showed thousands of citations of slang use from major publications, TV shows, movies, etc. Google penalized the site because of that.[1]

I wanted to show the citations because they're a major way that I differentiate my site from other slang dictionaries like Urban Dictionary. So I used AJAX to load the citations, hoping that Google wouldn't index that and penalize the site.

I was wrong - but that doesn't mean what I was doing was black hat. It was the opposite.

[1] I'm fairly confident that Google penalized the site in part because of the citations, which was performed algorithmically. But it may also be the case that former Google employee, and head of the web spam team, Matt Cutts played a primary role in manually - and permanently - penalizing the site.

Post reply on HN