display none css and google

[kitcorsa]

Reading the webmaster guidelines from google the use of the display none to hide item is.......well.......advised against.

reading these terms and guidline this can use of this can result in your site being removed from google.

ive used the display:none to hide thing which you cant turn off as standard in zencart. will this effect my listing???

[CJPinder]

ive used the display:none to hide thing which you cant turn off as standard in zencart. will this effect my listing???

It is highly unlikely that using display:none in this way will affect your Google rankings. Many sites use it in that way. Google are only really concerned with when people are trying to hide content to fool their systems. The only times I've heard of them penalizing sites due to hidden content it was done after a human review of the site rather than an automatic process.

Regards,
Christian.

[zcnb]

I found this thread after coming across, completely by coincidence (Google search on something else), the following article:

http://www.softblog.com/2008-10/gett...google-winter/

I don't have (yet) any problems with Google search but reading that "display: none" is a violation of Google's terms prompted me to search in my own CSS.

Sure enough, I found that I have been using the following to hide the "Sponsors" title in that sidebox:

#bannerboxallHeading {
display: none;
}

This was based on the advice given here:
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showth...light=sponsors

How likely is it to affect Google rankings?

[mprough]

For example... If you are using display none to not display something with text.... Then also remove the text from your language files.

Many flyout menus are a big deal, for example, a flyout menu with 9 sub-categories under it is hiding every single one of those sub-category names... Generally, keyword rich names.

So, Google polices this very badly... Which is exactly why about a year ago they turned the webmasters on each other.

So Joe from a competing site visits your site and sees this... he logs in to webmaster tools ----- or even completely anonymously reports you to Google for hidden text.

This prompts a manual review, by a human. Then in a perfect world you are kept apprised in your own webmaster's tools.

For example, If I don't wish to use for example the tagline... I don't hide it, I remove it in a template override. Just for good measure.

~Melanie

[kitcorsa]

cheers well over 2 years on and its not effected us so i think im fine, thanks for the advice people