Hiding Menu Item with CSS - will Google penalise my site? [closed]

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I want to ask you about something. I want to hide some sub menu items , using the css class, and assign it to the specific menu item. For example the class is nodisplay

/* Hide menu items */
.nodisplay {
display:none !important;
}

This works great, but I wonder if this would be penalized by Google, as I read that Google don't like hidden texts? I read that Google marks this as spam, is it true not ?

I have a look at the Gavick Menus and Helix Menus, they are using display: none; or left:-999em; too for making the elements.

So my dilemma is if I use display: none; for hiding all my sub level 3 menu items , will Google penalize my site or not ?

Thank you in advance

Answer 1

This is a SEO question, which you can ask here: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/

Google will disregard anything that's not displaying. Remember that Google works with the source code not the outcome, so anything you do in your source code except server side, is public.

Even if they detect displaying blue words on blue background, Google will disregard that too or even punish for such technique.

Having a display:none is not so serious however, as we know that sometimes its use cannot be avoided. But sometimes there are better ways for swapping content than toggle() in jQ. Try to enhance your code to contain less or no non-displaying content, and it will be okay in SEO POV.

Rendering the page for the first time should return no non-displaying content, so Google will not detect a black hat trial. After that, you can do anything with JS, it wont affect SERP rankings.