There are situations where a website needs to place a lot of additional text on a webpage, but it interferes with the visual designs & potentially user-experience. So, whaddya do?
For example, what if you want to include a video transcript on your video webpage, or place a list of UPC codes on an ecommerce site, it could be a very large amount of text.
How can you elegantly place the additional text on the page without messing up the user experience, and/or appearing spammy?
The answer is to create collapsible content that exists on a page that is still crawlable to the search engine spiders. But, if you use AJAX, can it still be SEO friendly?
One might wonder if the collapsible DIV is search engine friendly since it is in Javascript. However, it can still be crawled by making jQuery SEO friendly.
Google is able to read Javascript onclick textlinks.
If you’re defaulting to visible for the spiders, but hidding the DIV via javascript for normal users, that seems similar to cloaking. Is it considered Black Hat SEO because the content is hidden? Isn’t it intentionally differing the appearance for the search engines?
I wouldn’t consider this Black Hat SEO because you are showing the copy on the page without having to go to another page or even refreshing the page. The copy in the include file is being displayed on the page it is intended for when a user chooses for the full copy to be displayed.
White hat all the way!
I found a good example using the jquery framework.
It is spiderable. I used a Search Engine Spider Simulator to check:
Here are 3 things to remember to insure your collapsible DIVs are Search Engine Friendly:
- Make sure your page is configured with all of your DIVS expanded when JavaScript is disabled.
- Make sure all the divs and the text is on the page–and not called from an external file.
- Make sure the header line is visible, otherwise you might be considered as hiding text.
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