5 replies to this topic

[chapulin]

I'm considering adding a slideshow to the main page of my site, with each slide being a picture (background) with a paragraph of text each (with natural keywords in the description related to the image). Since it's theoretically hidden text (until it's its time to show), is it a dangerous thing for SEO? Where does it go from ok to not ok (like, say, the slideshow is 300 images, meaning 299 hidden paragraphs, only 1 showing at a time)?

[Michael Martinez]

Google has said that if some of the text is visible without the user doing anything AND if it's made clearly, plainly, distinctly obvious to the user that they can see the rest of the text by clicking on some self-identified link or button, you should be okay.

However, that's a rule of thumb. If you place 99% of the text in the "hidden" section, that might be seen as deceptive or sneaky.

Also, you do NOT want to place any DIVs outside the visible coordinates. That is, all margin placements should have positive PX values. Google stated last year that they will now deem negative placements as sneaky or deceptive because it is impossible for them to determine intent for those kinds of situations.

If you're in real doubt, you could embed the slideshow in an iframe and as long as you don't point any crawlable links to the iframed page you should be fine -- but the content won't be indexed and it won't assist in helping determine relevance for your page.

[cfreek]

Google stated last year that they will now deem negative placements as sneaky or deceptive because it is impossible for them to determine intent for those kinds of situations.

Do you have any links to further reading on this? (Googled it and wasn't finding anything) I use negative values fairly often for various reasons...
Thanks

[Michael Martinez]

Maile Ohye wrote about using negative values in text placement on her blog.

If possible, it’s still best to avoid techniques such as “text-indent:-9999px” or “margin:-4000px” or “left:-2000em”.

[chapulin]

These divs would be display:none until their time comes and are shown. I do want the text to be indexed (that's the idea behind adding the text as foreground to the images instead of just adding the text to the images themselves). It's basically a standard slideshow you see everywhere, but instead of the slides being an image, they're divs with text and the background is the image, so one div with its text is displayed at a time every 5 seconds or so.
In a related question, if those divs are marked as display:none in the html, will search engines index those texts, or should I not mark them as display:none and hide them via javascript at page_load ?

[Jill]

It should be fine as long as your are not kw stuffing, the captions make sense to users and people would be easily able to notice and view them on your site.