Hiding content and SEO

[Semseng]

Hello there,

I have been recently developing a website that obviously has to be responsive but it is the first project, in which I need to take care of SEO as well. I chose UiKit as the CSS framework, it looks to be pretty neat and suitable for my needs. I have chosen some layout template from their site as the base and now I am simply writing code for it.

At the same time, I am trying to fill the lack of knowledge about SEO, reading some book and articles on the Internet; it seems pretty complicated but well, I'd have to learn it some day

The thing is that in my website, I have the same files with the same content for both desktop and mobile versions, while CSS is what does all the stuff to switch between the versions. Now, an issue appeared, since I am planning to simply hide some content visible in desktop version for the mobile one (like large splash screen and full company credentials above the navigation) and vice versa (in mobille version, there's going to be a hamburger menu, logo and a phone icon with a submenu with href links directly to telephone numbers). The thing is that currently it is handled by UiKit's classes that simply add "display: none !important;" to content that is not to be visible on a chosen version.

And now, if I think correctly, crawlers collect the whole HTML data without caring for CSS, and so if I have double, separate navigation bars, they are both being crawled with links guiding to pages on the website. Next, the splash screen is crawled even on mobile version whereas it is not going to be displayed.

So, finally, should i avoid using such solutions? Do they have a significant negative impact on SEO ranking?

Thanks, have a good day and upcoming weekend!
Sem

 

[GigaGreg]

[No message]

 

[Peter]

Google is clever and can understand CSS and JavaScript pretty good. I don't think you need to worry about being penalized for hidden content in this case.

Note that text and images that are hidden still needs to be loaded so it would be wasteful if there are a lot of content that can never be shown (not even from the menus). If it's just a few lines of text or a few small images it's probably not a big deal but if you got a big banner that's only shown on the desktop version of the website you probably should use a hiding technique that prevents the image from being loaded when not visible (such as displaying it as a CSS background image). The time it takes for your pages to load is one of many ranking factors that Google uses, but it's not only about pleasing Google. People with limited bandwidth will also appreciate if there are less to be loaded.

 

[unicapital]

Google can now interpret Javascript and CSS so he will see what he has to see! Take a look at the latest updates from them and follow the webmaster central blog. Also enter your website in webmaster central and you can see there exactly what google sees on your website

 

[adrianbyrne]

There are a lot of advantages of doing SEO, it does to help certain webpages rank higher in search results, and it helps to build and bring more organic traffic to your webpage which will increase your revenue and visibility both. I am the professional SEO expert and I work for a Graduate CV Writing Specialists company