What is Google hidden content on Mobile?

Hiding text or links in your content(Content on Mobile)  to control Google’s search rankings are often seen as deceptive and could be a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Text (such as excessive keywords) is often hidden in several ways, including, using white text on a white background.

The Risk of Hidden Content-

Hidden content on mobile has long been a forbidden practice on websites, primarily due to past abuses.

It’s a story that has been around as long as Google has; something comes close to abuse the search ranking algorithm, and Google updates the algorithm to penalize sites that are abusing it.

It happened with keyword stuffing and also the Meta keywords field, it happened with tiered link building and personal blog networks, it happened with thin content and content spinning, and everything else that’s penalized today.

The second and far more important difference is that the solution isn’t actually hidden. It’s invisible once you first load the page, but it’s easily made visible when the user wants to examine it.

The intent isn’t to cover the content and game the search algorithm, it’s to form the page easier to navigate.

This is an example of how Google rates similar concepts differently. In one case, hidden text is an abuse of a loophole and is penalized.

In the other, it’s a benefit to user accessibility and therefore the user experience and maybe a benefit to the page.

How hidden content on mobile impact SEO?

There are a couple of case studies and articles written about this and its impact on SEO. See, once you load the page at a tiny scale, those dynamic elements still load, they’re just hidden.

Even though you load the page on a mobile device, that content is usually lazy-loaded within the background just in case the user wants to ascertain it. Yet without being able to expand the window, it’s possible that the content isn’t accessible.

Many webmasters want to cover content on a mobile page for several reasons, to form a page look cleaner, to not bombard a visitor with masses of text, or just to form it easier for a visitor to seek out what they’re trying to find with the power to click on which part they’d like more information on.

But, all SEOs know that hidden content on mobile may be a no-no when it involves Google so is there any impact when it involves hiding content for mobile users? The solution is no, but as long as you implement it correctly.

As long because the content you’re hiding on the mobile-friendly version of the site is that the same content on the desktop site – and that content is visible on desktop – it won’t hurt SEO for the page.

Hidden content is discounted in the ranking, but if the content is visible on the desktop version of your site, we will crawl it and use the data for ranking your mobile site also since we will share indexing signals between the desktop and mobile versions.

Conclusion–Hidden content on mobile devices might not get indexed (or might not be weighed as heavily) vs. fully visible content. However, a Googler recently stated that hidden content on mobile is ok.

But also said that within the same video, if it’s critical content it should be visible’” it’s, therefore, necessary to think about the principles Google promotes and reach an informed conclusion on the most effective approach.

There’s no single blanket recommendation and thus each page must be assessed on its own merit. Wherever possible, content that’s considered to be of core relevance to the first topic of the page must be visible to the user upon page load, and not hidden using JavaScript.