Muse SEO - Hiding text boxes with content for Search Engines

[brianr20171]

Hi there,

I am building a website in Muse where I would like to incorporate a couple informational animations made with Edge. I am however concerned about the written content in the animations being converted to images and thus not being recognised by search bots. I'm new to this but could I create text boxes with a copy of the same text that is in the animations and then simply hide the text boxes behind other elements in the page? Would this text with all the metadata be discoverable by search engines even though it is hidden from view? Could something like this work or am I not understanding how this really works?

Thank you for your consideration,

Brian

[J-26 · Accepted solution]

There are 2 ways of hiding content on a page:

1. Setting opacity to 0
2. Hiding inside a breakpoint

If you go with 1, a search engine will be able to find the text but when it realizes that the text is not visible on the page, it will likely regard the text as spam.

If you go with 2, a search engine will not index the text at all if it is not visible on any breakpoint.

Unless something has changed about edge, animations that are added to a page from edge are added via an iframe which means that to a search engine, nothing inside of an edge animation exists on that page.

If that isn't how edge works anymore, than I am wrong about that last part.

[brianr20171]

Thank you for the reply. A little disapointing the strategy won't work.

Thanks again,

Brian

[brianr20171]

Hi again,

I'm going to try one more time on this. This could sound silly but if for example I had a red rectangle in the design and I placed some text with the same red color over it so it was there but hidden in a sense. Would that text be indexed and not considered spam?

Thanks again,

Brian

[J-26]

Search engines can still detect that the text is not visible to the user so it would be considered spam. Here's a few of the clever techniques spammers used that search engines learned how to detect:

• Hiding text on a page by placing an object or image on top of the text
• Changing the text's opacity to 0
• Making text the same color as the background of the page

[brianr20171]

Hmmm. I see. Thank you again for your response.

Very best,

Brian

[brianr20171]

Hello once more J-26,

Thanks again for helping me with this. I had one more question on the subject. I am now considering only using the Edge animations for the largest breakpoint, for the desktop version. The reason is that I have seen spotty performance from interactive animations from other web sites particularly on their tablet and phone iterations. I'm not sure why but it seems to be often the case.

Again I'm new to this but if I build my site where the text information that is in the interactive animations of the desktop breakpoint is presented more traditionally as visible text information in the tablet and phone breakpoints...that information should be searchable correct?

Very best,

Brian