I am starting to redesign and develop a site that contains a lot of text and I am thinking of ways to organize the information on the site so that it looks cleaner. On some parts of the site I would like to implement a jquery toggle effect where some content is placed in a hidden div and that content will show or hide depending on a user’s onclick event.
Would this technique of organizing content greatly harm the SEO of the site? At what point would google start viewing this as spam and drop the site from being indexed all together?
//Update – found some answers.
I guess to clarify, as a response to some answers below, the purpose of the hidden divs would be to toggle between showing/hiding the content for organizational purpose where any hidden text would eventually be shown to the user.
However, after much digging around, Matt Cutts from google does pretty much say that as long as you are not keyword stuffing your hidden text and abusing the system by trying to trick the googlebot, you should generally be fine. He also gives a funny example of keyword stuffing gone wrong.
It will be indexed but can be frowned upon by Google if you are hiding/showing content for SEO reasons. In other words, what Google sees should be what the user sees when clicking the link.