Matt Cutts: It’s Fine as Long as Your “Hidden Texts” Does Good for Users

by Jenifer Renjini - 7/25/2013 5976 Views

A New Video By Matt Cutts on, "Hidden Texts" Seen Inside “Click More”

Matt Cutts on Hidden Texts You could see lots of videos in Google Webmaster Help this month from Matt Cutts, Google’s Webspam Team Head in which he replies to the enquiries of webmasters which are mainly focused on Contents and Spammy links. Very recently (July 22) Matt answered a question regarding Duplicate Content. And today the video is all about “Hidden Texts”. All these results emphasize that, these days’ webmasters are more concerned on improving the quality of every single page of their website, in both users and search engine point of view.

More obviously, product oriented sites use the “More option or Show Details option” for users, where descriptive/elaborative information would be given for users in a hidden way. Today’s Matt Cutts video, gives out a brief description about these hidden texts inside Options or Buttons.

The question is,

“How does Google treat hidden content which becomes visible when clicking a button? Does it look spammy if most of the text is in such a section? (e.g. simple page to buy something and “show details” button which reveals a lot of information about it).”

Matt Cutts says that he is not more concerned on this but still he wants to talk about its consequences, if it is used the wrong way. He adds that, “ It’s pretty common on the web for people to want to be able to say, ‘Click here,’ ‘show manufacturer details,’ ‘show specifications,’ ‘show reviews,’ and that’s a pretty normal idiom at this point. It’s not deceptive. Nobody’s trying to be manipulative.”

He also says that, if it’s easy to know that these texts are intended only for users then there wouldn’t be any issues to be noted. For the best on page optimization service click here.

Malpractices with Hidden Texts

Matt Cutts mentioned some of the malpractices that,

“Now certainly if you were using a tiny little button that users can’t see, and there’s like six pages of text buried in there, and it’s not intended for users, and it’s keyword-stuffing, then that is something that we could probably consider it as a hidden text.” In general “if you just have something where you have a nice jquery AJAXy sort of site, and things get revealed, and you’re trying to keep things clean, that’s not the sort of thing that’s going to be on the top of our list to worry about because there’s a lot of different sites that really do that.”

For example,

Take Wikipedia on your mobile phone. They’ll have different sections, and then if you click, they expand those sections, and there are good usability reasons for doing that.

So finally, as long as you are not trying to stuff anything in a hidden way to get rankings and as long as they are used only for users, then it seems everything is fine and on track.

Matt Cutts video on "Hidden Texts"

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About Jenifer Renjini

Here at SubmitInMe, I write articles focusing on SEO trends and latest SEO updates, providing you the right information on the right time. My Life and Career both lie on the same graph, So Far So .... more info