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I'm working on a site that has a speedbump set up to give a disclaimer when visitors leave our site for another. We then have a whitelist of URLs for external sites where this speedbump does not pop up. The source code for these whitelisted sites is placed in the source code of each page within paragraph tags that aren't visible on the webpages but are within the code.

It looks as though this gets crawled as on page content by tools like SEMRush. Does it likewise get crawled as content by Google?

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    You can use Google search console and fetch the page to find out.
    – closetnoc
    Commented May 22, 2017 at 16:28
  • I know this is not a part of your question but those type of outbounds generally dampen the user experience since it's not fluid.
    – Simon Hayter
    Commented May 22, 2017 at 19:19
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    "... in the source code of each page within paragraph tags" - What do you mean "within p tags"? You don't normally put source code within any HTML tag? Source code would not normally get crawled as "on page content" except maybe for eeking out URLs. Aside: How do these "seedbumps" work with middle clicks or Ctrl+click (or Context Menu > "Open link in new tab")?
    – DocRoot
    Commented May 22, 2017 at 20:44
  • I agree with DocRoot. It would make sense to move this whitelist into JavaScript. Something like var whitelist = "example.com,example.net".split(",");
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented May 23, 2017 at 8:42

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Google does crawl and see content in the page that is hidden by default. However Google does not usually index content that is initially hidden. Googlebot now renders pages and indexes the parts of the page that are visible on page load.

Occasionally Google will index hidden content if it knows it can easily be shown. When it does so, it usually gives it much less weight than other text on the page and it will be unlikely to rank well.

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