Does google punish for links hidden for better user experience? [closed]

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Currently I have a very clean and (according to me)beautiful home page of my website (http://www.writerbabu.com) for the non logged-in users and only very important links are on this page.

Now I want to include some more links and some descriptive content on this so that:

1. users who want to know more can find the content on the same page
2. have some SEO advantage with better interlinking by having some more relevant links

I also don't want to let go of the clean look and don't want to clutter the page with too many links and text. SO one solution that I thought is:

Place only one button like link with the text "More useful links" and when user clicks on it, show the links. Note that basically I will be turning the display:none; property to display:block; for some div container which holds the links (using jQuery).

My concern is that "Google don't like the hidden links".

Will my site's Google PR(page rank) will be affected if I do what I have proposed above?

An example of something similar to what I am planning to do can be seen here in the footer of http://www.bigbite.in. Click on the "Delhi" or "Noida" a pop up will appear which contains the link.

Please help!! Sorry if I asked something very obvious.

Answer 1

The answer is no, Google does not punish for links hidden for a better user experience. They frown upon malicious hidden text that can never be visible to a user, but understand obviously that JavaScript is frequently used to display content when certain events happen on the page. Below is a link from Google clarifying this. One suggestion they have is to

Place the same content from the JavaScript in a <noscript> tag. If you use this method, ensure the contents are exactly the same as what’s contained in the JavaScript, and that this content is shown to visitors who do not have JavaScript enabled in their browser.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=15263&answer=66353

In addition, here is a resource from a person that actually tested if Google indexed hidden elements: http://seotesttool.com/blog/does-the-google-bot-index-css-hidden-divs/