I have a paragraph of text that I would like to count toward the content of a page, but users have to click to make the text appear. Can I and if so what is the best way to implement this without getting penalized by Google?
3 Answers
The way you have done it is fine. Search engines don't penalize site for having hidden text. They penalize sites for manipulating their search rankings, A common way to do this is to hide text from users but make it available to search engines. But you are not doing that here. Your content is available to users and is only awaiting an event to occur before it can be displayed. That is both common and acceptable.
answered Feb 27, 2014 at 1:48
It is not uncommon to use javascript to collapse and expand content. Examples are on the net. However, if you are hiding the content for SEO purposes, then that is a mistake. You may get away with it for a while. It may even help. But not enough to really help rank. Which gets me to the point. What is the purpose of that you are trying to do? If you are trying to get a bump in the SERPs, the it sounds like a fools game to me. If you are trying to do something good for the user, then I cannot imagine what it could be. Where content is collapsed, it benefits the user by reducing the details and allowing the user to see the details when desired. In effect, the mechanism makes a long page shorter without sacrificing content. If that is what you are trying to do, it should not be a paragraph unless it is a sub-thought that could be expanded to clarify a thought. In everything you do, benefit the user and not machines.
Search engines index pages, not paragraphs; that means that the whole page is going to be indexed.
About being penalized, you don't have to worry if the content is legal, by that I mean that is not just a bunch of keywords stuffed there for SEO purposes. Even if you have many pages with the same mechanic, it's not a problem.
Search engines and all the back stage work they do, is getting more and more "intelligent", so they "know" that the content is aimed for users, but with some restrictions or conditions to view it, like spoilers that are only viewed if the users really wants to. The same way, they can detect if the hidden content is there just to try to achieve higher ranking.
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This answer is incorrect. A search index maps words to a list of pages containing those words. Google may choose to not add a portion of the words on the page to the search index. Aug 14, 2017 at 16:55