There are a lot of legitimate reasons to use ‘display:none‘ in the CSS of a web page. However, you should be aware that Google gives hidden content less weight. Google’s Gary Illyes has explained this in an online discussion.
“Most of the major search engines (including Google) are rendering the content they receive from the website, in our (Google’s) case with something close to a headless browser, so whatever you do for the users the search engines will also get it. Serving different stuff to search engines however will get you into a dangerous area, named cloaking.
Hiding the content with a display:none might backfire on you. We are giving hidden content way less weight in ranking.”
Gary Illyes did not say that pages that use display:none will get penalized. There are many different factors that influence the position of your web pages in Google’s search results. The tools in SEOprofiler help you to optimize them all. If you haven’t done it yet, try SEOprofiler now:
