I was wondering recently if Google indexes hidden div tags. There are a couple applications I'm working on that use hidden divs for things like menus and tool tips. It would be great if Google indexed these tags and ignored the hidden attribute because, even though it's hidden from the user, it's still content on our site and will be shown to the user on a mouse over. I also wonder if screen readers will see it properly, but that's another experiment.

In the great tradition of the scientific method, I have placed two div tags on this page. One is a regular div tag and one is hidden with a CSS visibility:hidden attribute. They contain two unique words appearing no where else in the entire world, or at least not in Google. Since Google grabs the source code of a page and indexes it, both of these new words should appear in Google in a matter of days.

But is Google somehow being "smart" about hidden div tags and skipping them for indexing? We shall soon find out.

Update: Both words show up in Google. The word in the hidden div tag shows up in the Google preview text like it wasn't even treated special on the page. I wonder if Google just strips out all the tags before indexing the content of a page, treating everything the same that's not in the header?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2005 at 3:28 pm by Joe and is filed under General, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.