Top 3 SEO myths you should know about
December 6, 2016
I work with a lot of web marketers and have the luxury to be able to learn from the best. I recently had a conversation with one in particular who knew a lot about SEO, but disagreed with a lot of the techniques I’ve learned from other SEO marketers. This conversation gave me a good idea to make a post about debunking some SEO myths some of you may believe.
Mythbusting time.
Can Google find & read hidden text in tabs or accordions?
The short answer is yes, Google will definitely find & read (also known as indexing) hidden content.
Even though Google will index hidden text or images in tabs or accordions, any hidden content on the page will hold less value than any visible content.
If you’re hiding a large amount of text on your website, Google may actually penalize your website if they think your trying to implement “Black Hat SEO”.
So if you have some really important text that you want users to be able to search for to find your website, make sure it’s visible on your website! And if you do decide to hide content on your website, keep it at a minimum.
Will Google index hidden dynamically content?
Dynamic Content includes text or images that are loaded on your website after the webpage loads. This happens a lot in modern web design and is a very common practice. If you ever view the page’s source, any content that loads after the page loads will be no where to be found – so then how can Google see it?
To allow Google to index dynamic content there used to be many hackish techniques web developers had to do. Google has gotten really smart in modern times, and now they can definitely index dynamic content without any issues.
A website is usually made up of many files, and Google will index all of these files to predict how your website will function. So don’t fret – Google will index any text and images loaded after your initial web page loads.
www or no www
Some website links include the www., and other don’t. For example, if you type google.ca into your browser, Google will redirect you to www.google.ca, with the www. prepended to their domain name. If you type www.mashable.com, Mashable will redirect you to mashable.com, removing the www.
So which way is the right way?
Trick question. There is no right way. It all depends on your preference.
The www. used to be common convention, but now it’s 100% optional.
There is one catch: you can use either, but not both. If you choose to use the www., make sure that when someone goes to your-domain.com, it redirects to www.your-domain.com. Otherwise Google will penalize you for duplicate content since your domain with and without the www. are considered two different sites.