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Today's question comes from Cologne.
Thomas asks, "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,
for example, a simple page to buy something and Show Details
button which reveals a lot of
information about it?" OK.
I wouldn't be overly concerned about this.
But let's talk through the different consequences.
It's pretty common on the web for people to want to be able
to say, OK, click here and then show manufacturer detail,
show specification, show reviews.
And that's a pretty normal idiom at this point.
It's not deceptive.
Nobody's trying to be manipulative.
It's easy to see that this is text that's
intended for users.
And so as long as you're doing that, I really wouldn't be too
stressed out.
Now certainly if you're 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 possibly
could consider hidden text or probably would
consider hidden text.
But in general, if you just have something where you have
a nice Ajax-y 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 a lot of different sites really do that.
It's pretty common on the web.
A lot of people expect that on the web.
Take, for example, Wikipedia on your mobile phone, they'll
have different sections.
And then if you click, they expand those sections.
And there's good usability reasons for doing that.
So as long as you're not trying to stuff something in
in a hidden way that's deceptive or trying to distort
the rankings, as long as you're just doing that for
users, I think you'll be in good shape.