# data[].attributes.body
Google will index hidden html div but it will have less ranking influence.
It's not that it won't be counted at all.
Google knows the text is there. It just isn't counting it as highly. It's like content that isn't carrying the same weight as it would if it were visible by default.
Google will not treat content that is concealed behind tabs, or any other element where JavaScript is used to reveal content, in the same way as content that is visible as standard. However, it will still be indexed, so pages may rank for search phrases related to content contained within the hidden sections.

# data[].attributes.body
Yes it does. Google uses various methods to determine whether hidden content exists on a site, but they also allow other forms of hidden content.Hiding content within tabs, accordions, or other elements that rely on JavaScript to reveal it to users is likely to be treated differently by Google, and assigned far less importance.Websites, therefore, must take a considered approach and use this method only to hide content that is of secondary importance to the primary topic of the page, or that covers related topics

# data[].attributes.body
Yes,the current understanding is that Google will not treat content that is concealed behind tabs, accordions, or any other element where JavaScript is used to reveal content
The reasons for using hidden text, and how it is implemented, can vary.

Here are a few reasons why some SEO professionals use this tactic.

Including Keywords They Can’t Show to the Public

Keyword Spamming the Page

Hiding Links

# data[].attributes.body
Yes, the DIV tag will be indexed by google but it may not be displayed to the users. The website tells the google to crawl only to those parts of the web page for which it has given permission to robot.txt.
Mohamed Taqi Mithani(1514030)

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Hidden text and links Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

Using white text on a white background Locating text behind an image Using CSS to position text off-screen Setting the font size to 0 Hiding a link by only linking one small character—for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that's not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?

However, not all hidden text is considered deceptive. For example, if your site includes technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript, images, or Flash files, using descriptive text for these items can improve the accessibility of your site. Remember that many human visitors using screen readers, mobile browsers, browsers without plug-ins, and slow connections will not be able to view that content either and will benefit from the descriptive text as well. You can test your site’s accessibility by turning off JavaScript, Flash, and images in your browser, or by using a text-only browser such as Lynx

# data[].attributes.body
Yes, the DIV tag will be indexed by google. Google does not treat the hidden text in the same manner as the normal text. Google knows the text is there. It just isn't counting it as highly. It's like content that isn't carrying the same weight as it would if it were visible by default. So, given that we know that, we have to decide in the trade off situation whether it's worth it to lose the ranking value and the potential visitors in exchange for whatever we're gaining by having this element.

Kavya Purushothaman(1514001)

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The hidden Div tag will be indexed by Google.It will be indexed but can be frowned upon by Google if you are hiding/showing content for SEO reasons. In other words, what Google sees should be what the user sees when clicking the link.

# data[].attributes.subject
The hidden Div tag will be indexed by Google.It will be indexed but can be frowned upon by Google if you are hiding/showing content for SEO reasons. In other words, what Google sees should be what the user sees when clicking the link.

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How does Google handle javascript ?
https://moz.com/blog/google-css-javascript-hidden-text

Relevant references from Matt Cutts in regards to Google handling hidden content:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpK1VGJN4XY

http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts.sht... (do a search for hidden)

Link supporting the arguement :
https://tomaltman.com/does-the-google-bot-index-css-hidden-divs/

-By
Soham Hichkad (1514021)

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Yes the Div tag will be indexed. Google disapproves of the hidden content if you are hiding/showing content for SEO reasons. But Its definitely okay to put hidden div tag  as long as the hidden content is relevant to the page it should not appear to be spam.

-Mehul Bhanushali (1514007)

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Yes it is true, Google is no longer indexing hidden div tags. Spammers used hidden divs to hide content, but also many non-spammers and even non-SEOs have used them for design purposes. The theory is that the Jagger Update now hurt any site using hidden divs. One example site thrown out in Phil's forum was a white hat site at ducor.com that used hidden divs for its menus. If you look at the site's CSS you will notice in the CSS code a line for #elnav {position:absolute; visibility:hidden;}. The member reports that the site "has been all but delisted from Google now.. Right now they show just 4 of our pages in the index.."

# data[].attributes.body
Google does index hidden DIV tags.
As long as the text is available on that page when Google crawls it, Google can see the text and use it in relevance calculations.

Reference:
https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/javascript-seo/#how-google-treats-text-hidden-but-revealed-using-javascript-css-e-g-read-more-links

As  quoted by Google SEO  analyst John Mueller
"I think we’ve been doing something similar for quite awhile now, where if we can recognize that the content is actually hidden, then we’ll just try to discount it in a little bit. So that we kind of see that it’s still there, but the user doesn’t see it. Therefore, it’s probably not something that’s critical for this page. So that includes, like, the Click to Expand. That includes the tab UIs, where you have all kinds of content hidden away in tabs, those kind of things"

BUT
Google has historically assigned more ‘weight’ in terms of relevance to pages where the text is completely visible to the user. Many designers use tabs and “read more” links to effectively hide text from being visible on loading a page.

- Prasad Gujar (1514019)

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Using an "off stage" div (negative position) is widely used and is as well known to the Google bot as a div with display:hidden or visibility:none.Here's how to do it:Have all of your objects totally displayed and completely visible and right on stage in your HTML code, just as Google wants.... but THEN... have your javascript onload event apply the positioning that you want in the browser client.The result... perfect SEO, and a perfect experience for the visitor.

# data[].attributes.subject
Using an "off stage" div (negative position) is widely used and is as well known to the Google bot as a div with display:hidden or visibility:none.Here's how to do it:Have all of your objects totally displayed and completely visible and right on stage in your HTML code, just as Google wants.... but THEN... have your javascript onload event apply the positioning that you want in the browser client.The result... perfect SEO, and a perfect experience for the visitor.

# data[].attributes.body
Mansi mota(1514032

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Answer:There is a rumour that Google does not index hidden (HTML) DIV tags. Is it true?

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Answer:There is a rumour that Google does not index hidden (HTML) DIV tags. Is it true?

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Alekh Shah(1414110)

Yes,the current understanding is that Google will not treat content that is concealed behind tabs, accordions, or any other element where JavaScript is used to reveal content, in the same way as content that is visible as standard. However, it will still be indexed, so pages may rank for search phrases related to content contained within the hidden sections.

Here is a quick guide to 'Hidden Div Tags/Hidden text':

What are Google’s guidelines for hiding content using JavaScript and CSS?

November 2014 – Google’s John Mueller stated that Google “may not” index or rank hidden content. In a Google+ Hangout the following month, John repeated this, stating that hidden content would be “discounted” and has been for a number of years

21 July 2015 – Google’s Gary Illyes, contributing to a Stack Overflow forum thread , provided clarification of this by stating that this type of content is given “way less weight in ranking”

27 July 2015 – In a separate Stack Overflow thread on the same topic, Gary Illyes again confirmed that “[Google] will index that but the content’s weight will be lower since it’s hidden”

What does this mean for my website?
Wherever possible, content that is considered to be of core relevance to the primary topic of the page MUST be visible to the user upon page load, and not hidden using JavaScript.

Why does Google devalue hidden content?
Google’s focus is on ensuring that the user experience within its search results is as good as possible. If the algorithm gave full weight to content hidden using JavaScript, this could be compromised.

In Sumary:

Hiding content within tabs, accordions, or other elements that rely on JavaScript to reveal it to users is likely to be treated differently by Google, and assigned far less importance

Websites, therefore, must take a considered approach and use this method only to hide content that is of secondary importance to the primary topic of the page, or that covers related topics

References:
https://www.freshegg.co.uk/blog/technical-seo/google/how-does-google-treat-hidden-content

# data[].attributes.headline
Hidden div tags indexing by Google Crawler

# data[].attributes.subject
Hidden div tags indexing by Google Crawler

# data[].attributes.body
Yes it does. Google uses various methods to determine whether hidden content exists on a site, but they also allow other forms of hidden content.

Hidden text and links Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

Using white text on a white background Locating text behind an image Using CSS to position text off-screen Setting the font size to 0 Hiding a link by only linking one small character—for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that's not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?

However, not all hidden text is considered deceptive. For example, if your site includes technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript, images, or Flash files, using descriptive text for these items can improve the accessibility of your site. Remember that many human visitors using screen readers, mobile browsers, browsers without plug-ins, and slow connections will not be able to view that content either and will benefit from the descriptive text as well. You can test your site’s accessibility by turning off JavaScript, Flash, and images in your browser, or by using a text-only browser such as Lynx.

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Does Google treat text kept behind "read more" links with the same importance as non-hidden text? The short answer is "no," but there's more nuance to it than that. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains just how the search engine giant weighs text hidden from view using CSS and JavaScript.

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat a little bit about hidden text, hidden text of several kinds. I really don't mean the spammy, black on a black background, white on a white background-like, hidden text type of keyword stuffing from the '90s and early 2000s. I'm talking about what we do with CSS and JavaScript with overlays and with folders inside a page, that kind of hidden text.

It's become very popular in modern web design to basically use CSS or to use JavaScript to load text after a user has taken some action on a page. So perhaps they've clicked on a separate section of your e-commerce page about your product to see other information, or maybe they've clicked a "read more" link in an article to read the rest of the article. This actually creates problems with Google and with SEO, and they're not obvious problems, because when you use something like Google's fetch and render tool or when you look at Google's cache, Google appears to be able to crawl and parse all of that text. But they're not treating all of it equally.

So here's an example. I've got this text about coconut marble furnishings, which is just a ridiculous test phrase that I'm going to use for this purpose. But let's say I've got page A, which essentially shows the first paragraph of this text, and then I have page B, which only shows part of the first sentence and then a "read more" link, which is very common in lots of articles.

Many folks do this, by the way, because they want to get engagement data about how many people actually read the rest of the piece. Others are using it for serving advertising, or they're using it to track something, and some people are using it just because of the user experience it provides. Maybe the page is crowded with other types of content. They want to make sure that if someone wants to display this particular piece or that particular piece, that it's available to them in as convenient a format as possible for design purposes or what have you.

What's true in these instances is that Google is not going to treat what happens after this "read more" link is clicked, which is that the rest of this text would become visible here, they're not going to treat that with the same weight that they otherwise would.

All other things being equal

So they're on similar domains, they have similar link profiles, all that other kind of stuff.

A is going to outrank B for "coconut marble furnishings" even though this is in the title here. Because this text is relevant to that keyword and is serving to create greater relevance, Google is going to weight this one higher.

It's also true that the content that's hidden behind this "read more" here, it doesn't matter. If it's CSS-based, JavaScript-based, post load or loaded when the HTML is, it doesn't matter, it's going to be weighted less by Google. It will be treated as though that text were not as important.

Interestingly, fascinatingly, perhaps, Bing and Yahoo do not appear to discern between these. So they'll treat these more equally. Google is the only one who seems to be, at least right now, from some test data - I'll talk about that in a sec - who is treating these differently, who is basically weighting this hidden content less.

Best practices for SEO and "hidden" text

So what can we discern from this? What should SEOs do when we're working with our web design teams and with our content teams around these types of issues?

I. We have to expect that any time we hide text with CSS, with JavaScript, what have you, that it will have less ranking influence. It's not that it won't be counted at all. If I were to search for "hardwood-like material creates beautiful shine," like that exact phrase in Google with quotes, both of these pages would come up, this one almost certainly first, but both of these pages would come up.

So Google knows the text is there. It just isn't counting it as highly. It's like content that isn't carrying the same weight as it would if it were visible by default. So, given that we know that, we have to decide in the tradeoff situation whether it's worth it to lose the ranking value and the potential visitors in exchange for whatever we're gaining by having this element.

II. We've got to consider some creative alternatives. It is possible to make text visible by default and to instead have something like an overlay element. We could have a brief overlay here that's easily close-able with a message. Maybe that could give us the same types of engagement statistics, because 95% of people are going to close that before they scroll down, or they're going to receive a popover message or those kinds of things. Granted, as we've discussed previously on Whiteboard Friday, overlays have their own issues that we need to be aware of, but these are possible. We can also measure scroll depth by doing some JavaScript tracking. There's lots of software that does that by default and plenty of GitHub repositories, that are open source, that we could use to track that. So there might be other ways to get the same goals.

III. If it is the case that you have to use the "read more" or any other text hiding elements, I would urge you to go ahead and place the crucial information, including the keyword phrases and the most related terms and phrases that you know are going to be very important to rankings, up in that most visible top portion of the page so that you maximize the ranking weight of the most important pieces rather than losing those below or behind whatever sorts of post-loading situation you've got. Make those the default visible portions of text.

I do want to give special thanks. One of the reasons that we know this, certainly Google has mentioned it on occasion, but over the course of the last few years there's been a lot of skepticism, especially from folks in the web design community who have sort of said, "Look, it seems like Google can see this. It doesn't seem to be a problem. When I search in quotes for this text, Google is bringing it back." That has been correct.

But thanks to Shai - I'm sorry if I mispronounce your name - Aharony from Reboot Online, RebootOnline.com, and I'll link to the specific test that they performed, but they performed some wonderful, large-scale, long-term tests of CSS, of text area, of visible text, and of JavaScript hiding across many domains over a long period and basically proved to us that what Google says is in fact true, that they are treating this text behind here with less weight. So we really appreciate the efforts of folks like that, who go through intense effort to give us the truth about how Google works.

That said, we will hopefully see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Does Google Handle CSS + Javascript "Hidden" Text? - Whiteboard Friday

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Does Google treat text kept behind "read more" links with the same importance as non-hidden text? The short answer is "no," but there's more nuance to it than that. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains just how the search engine giant weighs text hidden from view using CSS and JavaScript.

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It will be indexed but can be disapprved upon by Google if you are hiding/showing content for SEO reasons. In other words, what Google sees should be what the user sees when clicking the link.

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https://moz.com/blog/google-css-javascript-hidden-text

# data[].attributes.body
Yes, Google does index hidden div tags and that can be quite helpful for boosting SEO performance of a website. Hidden text is one of the oldest tricks in the SEO handbook. If you’re hoping hidden text will somehow boost your SEO efforts, you’ll quickly discover this outdated tactic is ineffective.

Back in the day, when search engines were much less sophisticated, you could hide text on webpages in an attempt to gain ranking for certain keywords not visible on the page. You could also hide links on other websites linking back to the page you wanted to gain ranking.

Also known as “content cloaking,” this tactic used to be work because, even though the text is hidden to users, search engines could still crawl it. But that’s no longer the case – search engines are much more sophisticated and better at detecting spammy tactics.

Why Hide Text?

The reasons for using hidden text, and how it is implemented, can vary.

Here are a few reasons why some SEO professionals use this tactic.

Including Keywords They Can’t Show to the Public

For instance, competitor names. In the attempt to rank for competitor brand terms, these keywords can’t be added due to legal compliance, corporate marketing policies, or stealthy SEO approaches.

There are also SEOs who use incorrectly spelled keywords and cloak them because it won’t look appropriate – and to put it bluntly, just appears wrong – if you use them on a post.

Keyword Spamming the Page

Some SEO professionals believe that increasing the keyword count on a page can help rank that keyword. This may have been an effective strategy in the ancient SEO ages (late ’90s to early 2000s) but not today.

Hiding Links

Links are still strong ranking factors. Many sites used to get links from other sites that were hidden. These links were hidden because often times they were unrelated to the content on the site where they were posted.

Sometimes, the links are added on the sites that are owned by the same company, or owned by a partner that has predefined this relationship. Other times, sites are hacked to be able to add the links; this is not only bad for SEO, but is also illegal.

Google doesn’t like these methods of optimization because they aren’t focused on improving ranking based on quality content; instead SEOs are merely trying to get around the search engine’s algorithm.

Over the years, Google has improved its capability of determining if and where hidden content exists.

If, for some reason, your hidden content gets past Google’s sophisticated crawler without detection, the quality of the hidden content or hidden links are often not good enough that they may still be ranked very low. Additionally, Google has manual reviewers whose sole task is to manually check websites for these kind of things and penalize the sites accordingly.

-Panchal Hinal(1514035)

# data[].attributes.body
Google will index hidden html div but it will have less ranking influence.
It's not that it won't be counted at all.
Google knows the text is there. It just isn't counting it as highly. It's like content that isn't carrying the same weight as it would if it were visible by default.
Google will not treat content that is concealed behind tabs, or any other element where JavaScript is used to reveal content, in the same way as content that is visible as standard. However, it will still be indexed, so pages may rank for search phrases related to content contained within the hidden sections.