Question

Wondering what would be better for SEO and a spider,

which is better for seo, a div with a style set to hidden or an title tag for a jquery tooltip

I am hesitant to put a div with a style set to hidden because a google spider might discard these types of divs and their content.

Thoughts?

— Another note: Another option could be to find each div for the tooltip content and with jquery hide them on page load.

Answer 1

SEO is quite an elusive subject, as you may know. Meaning, you can not draw a conclusion by simply asserting hiding content is bad for SEO, while things that is informative to users are good for SEO, since at least Google claims so. One simple example is images, a good images is more informative than several lines of words, but Good simply can not get.

My experience of SEO is that when you do not know whether something is good for bad for SEO, you need to consider at least two elements. One, whether Google is smart enough to index it. Second, is it good for your end users.

Hiding one div is not so horrible in SEO wise, I did it for a long time (almost 2 years) and I have not experienced any negative result. I added a learn more button though, just FYI. I think giving your users an option to see the whole content should you decide to hide it, then it is not a big deal. A caveat however, this is just my opinion backed by my past experience, I can not guarantee it will be true in the future.

In terms of JQuery tool tip, I am not sure since I am barely use it. However, it is widely hold that Google still does not crawl JavaScript, you’d better give JQuery a second thought. If possible, Ajax is a good choice though, anyway it is another story.

hope this helps