How Does Google Treat Hidden Content Within A Website?

Google has already announced in the past that it looks at webpage content just as users see it, which means that it renders webpages with CSS and JavaScript, just like a browser. We earlier discussed that blocking these files may lead to disruptions in the crawl process and ultimately impact the rankings. This applies to content and links that are hidden by JavaScript, only to be made visible by the click of a button or a link.

You commonly see this type of behavior on 'click to expand' or 'read more' buttons that reveal hidden content or links when clicked. If Google was to render webpages just like browsers do, and factor in JavaScripts too, then technically, it shouldn't index this hidden content.

That's not always the case.

From the clarifications Google has provided, there's no reason to suggest that Google wouldn't index such content. This includes links, text, links, and so on. According to Google;

..in general this is something where if the content isn’t really visible, then it’s really hard for us to say whether or not it makes sense to put a lot of weight on the content. And it doesn’t really matter if it’s a video, if it’s a link or if it’s images, this is essentially something that has been the case for really long time now that if this is really important and relevant content, then make sure that it’s actually visible.

The interesting thing here is, “it doesn’t really matter if it’s a video, if it’s a link or if it’s images.” This verifies that the scope of what Google considers to be content in these cases includes links.

This is definitely an interesting consideration in terms of menu structures, especially for the mega menus that are becoming so popular and also in terms navigation handling for large eCommerce sites.

This applies more to mobile web than anything else. In this mobile age, webmasters need to compress information, and only display it when needed, i.e. when a user wants. Hence, hidden menu options are a must for mobile.

When it comes to ranking, Google may still be relying heavily on the desktop experience for these types of ranking signals.