SEO hidden text and AJAX

Just because they will index it doesn't mean it won't harm your ability to rank for that text.

Google bot is a headless vesion of chrome - so while they can see that stuff, they also know when stuff isn't "visible" to the user and treat it accordingly.

The problem with tests like this is that you either need to test with site: or with made up terms - but the algorithm isn't static - it changes based on the corpus of relevant results. (e.g. if there's only 3 relevant results, then they won't apply spam penalties or panda weights, etc)

When you have such a small scale test, the corpus of results is always small - so it's not accurate.

I'm confident that if you tried these techniques on a site with content currently ranking in a highly competitive area, then changed it to one of these, your rankings would fall.

> Google bot is a headless vesion of chrome

I highly doubt this is the case, what is your source?

Everything Google has said that the bot does, plus a knowledge of coding. They aren't using a LYNX style browser to render javascript and determine the position of ads on pages. They have to be using a headless type of actual browser for that - and it's a safe bet they aren't using firefox or IE or safari.

They aren't telling us how Googlebot is coded, but it's pretty easy to deduce.

http://ipullrank.com/googlebot-is-chrome/ for more details