h1 and javascript code issues

[inertia]

Hidey Hi!

I have started SEO work on a new client and although the site has been built well there are some issues which i need some advice on.

The first thing i noticed was the h1 tag looks like this:

<h1>Email <span class="second">Marketing</span></h1>

Will this be diluting the strength of the h1 title tag at all? Have the spiders got the intelligence to see this as "email marketing"?

Also they have some javascript code that hides a lot of content. This has been done to hide good bit of content (about 300 words) because they did not want this content to affect the design and layout of the page.

(I can PM the java if anyone wants to check it?)

[Dubbya]

Looks a little "spammy" to me but it's not likely to have any adverse affect at all since spiders parse the CSS out anyway.

All they'd see would be "Email Marketing".

It's a rough guestimate in terms of how the bots work, but try out the page in a spider simulator.
PageRank » Search Engine Simulator

The hidden text would be more of an issue though, especially if it's not ever visible to humans. This begs the following rhetorical question;

If it's not ever visible to the user, why have it in the code? Hmmm???

[inertia]

That's what i figured with the h1 tag. Its just two styles of font so its perfectly legit and bots should be clever enough to ignore it.

I agree with the theory of the hidden text. There is a visible text link saying "click here" etc... So its not fully hidden. It does expand. Its quite grey hat tho!
Ive been in situations before when a web designer has not had a clue about textual content and designed a great site with no room for content. Being able to put an expandable link at the bottom is a better option than just whacking a load of text underneath the design.

[minstrel]

H1 seems to be somewhat devalued of late, probably because it has been abused:

New study: which web page elements lead to high Google rankings?
22 May 2007

The German company Sistrix (paper in German) analyzed the web page elements of top ranked pages in Google to find out which elements lead to high Google rankings. They analyzed 10,000 random keywords, and for every keyword, they analyzed the top 100 Google search results.

Which web page elements lead to high Google rankings?
Sistrix analyzed the influence of the following web page elements: web page title, web page body, headline tags, bold and strong tags, image file names, images alt text, domain name, path, parameters, file size, inbound links and PageRank.

• Keywords in the title tag seem to be important for high rankings on Google. It is also important that the targeted keywords are mentioned in the body tag, although the title tag seems to be more important.
  
• Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags don't seem to have an effect.
  
• Using keywords in bold or strong tags seems to have a slight effect on the top rankings. Web pages that used the keywords in image file names often had higher rankings. The same seems to be true for keywords in image alt attributes.
  
• Websites that use the targeted keyword in the domain name often had high rankings. It might be that these sites get many inbound links with the domain name as the link text.
  
• Keywords in the file path don't seem to have a positive effect on the Google rankings of the analyzed web sites. Web pages that use very few parameters in the URL (?id=123, etc.) or no parameters at all tend to get higher rankings than URLs that contain many parameters.
  
• The file size doesn't seem to influence the ranking of a web page on Google although smaller sites tend to have slightly higher rankings.
  
• It's no surprise that the number of inbound links and the PageRank had a large influence on the page rankings on Google. The top result on Google has usually about four times as many links as result number 11.

[inertia]

Bump...

I really need an answer to the question about the javascript that hides text behind a link. What are everyone's opinions on this? I know its border line black hat but i am in a real situation where it would save me serious time and hassle.

I'm working on a load of sites for work that are all div/css. The text area on each page is very small (a three line paragraph) and if i add any more it will break the design. Using this java method would be a perfect solution! What do you think brethren?

[arthurakay]

Originally Posted by inertia

but i am in a real situation where it would save me serious time and hassle.

Those are words to be wary of... for one reason or another, you'll probably spend more time doing things the "right" way (whatever it happens to be) later on.

As for the Javascript... I've used Javascript to create "tabs" on a page that display or move behind one another depending on a user's click. So, in that sense, I don't *think* the SERPs would penalize you... though I'm not really sure to be honest. My site's haven't been penalized for using it, but that doesn't mean Google smiles at its use.

The way you describe actually sounds similar to my idea of "Tabs"... which is somewhat similar to AJAX. Being that Google uses AJAX a great deal, I don't know how they determine what is white/grey/black when it comes to text styled via JavaScript. It's all convoluted... so just be careful.

[Dubbya]

inertia,

I've done that before as well, using an onclick event to set the div as visible. There's nothing "black hat" about it just as long as the "click here" link is visible and it's obvious that something is going to happen if you click the link. What really matters is your intent.

Were it me, I'd try to use some descriptive keywords that would provide users with a clue as to what's inside the div.

Besides, what you're describing might be better explained as an "expanding" layer, instead of "hidden" text.

Here's a link to an article in Matt Cutts' blog related to this very subject:
SEO Mistakes: Unwise comments

[alextj]

Inertia,

We have a FAQs page using an expanding layer - well coded and no problems otherwise, but Google has never liked the page, even though it contains great info, is user-friendly and has quite a few good links. It's at Advice on Teaching English in Italy | FAQs for English Teachers working in Italy if you want to check it out.

My hunch is that if this isn't the only example on the site you're ok, but probably the text isn't contributing much SEOwise, but if it's the only example on your site G takes a second look and errs on the side of caution.

Take care,
Alex