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SEO hidden text and AJAX

(devx.lt)
81 points Bogdanas | 1 comments | 30 Jul 15 12:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.24s | source
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melvinram ◴[30 Jul 15 13:45 UTC] No.9974888[source]▶
When hidden text and query are exact matches as well as unique, of course Google has no option but to show the only result it has.

What's important though is not that it's indexed or not. What's important is the weight that the text has on SEO ranking. I'd venture to guess that if two sites had the exact same text and one was hidden and the other wasn't, the latter would show higher in Google results.

replies(1): >>9975128 #
1. laumars ◴[30 Jul 15 14:22 UTC] No.9975128[source]▶
A few years ago it sites would get penalised for hiding tags as this was used by some -often dodgy- sites to cheat their search rankings (eg lots of hidden text about popular search items to direct people to an anti-virus scam page).

So then Google started giving heavy precedence to larger text (this also puts emphasis on titles), which lead to some CMSs having a "tag cloud" where tags are meshed together with more relevant / popular search items being in a larger font than less relevant / popular tags.

I think Google has moved on again since then and now detects if keywords appear in a natural sentence or if it's an artificial cloud of tags designed purely for SEO - but I could be wrong there. However this is the sort of detail I would have expected / hoped an article with "SEO" in the title* to comment on.

* Article's title rather than the HN submission title.