Velo and me are developing a multi language module for our CMS (well.. Velo is doing the developing, I'm just farting ideas his way) but we're stuck on something.

I said: why not have 2 divs. 1 for English, and 1 for French content. When the visitor selected French to be their language, the English div will be set to "hidden".
Velo said: "Isn't Google considering that as cheating?" I said: "Let's ask TWS"

How does google handle hidden divs?

Definitely do not use display:none
Google will possibly look away for one use but you are tempting fat and inviting the big fat "ban".

It's the way I use multi language on my blog. It's a plugin for Wordpress.. I don't care if my blog is not on Google, 'cause it's just for family and friends anyway, but for client's sites it's a different story,..

I would just recommend creating two different versions of the site.

/en/
/fr/

etc....

This is the way a lot of the big sites do. But I would not recommend hiding content or anything of that sort.

Yeah, well my first idea is to use the language in the url. So i can very well use /en/ and /fr/ etc and use mod_rewrite to give correct url to the database.
I'm gonna think a bit more on it too.

I wouldn't worry about hiding content. Google is well aware that there are user-friendly applications of {display: none}, as well as deceptive ones. Google takes many factors into consideration and will score your site accordingly; innocent use of hidden text is unlikely to tip you over their naughtiness threshold.

My website makes extensive use of hidden content, in order to offer customised content to users of different skill levels. And I rank rather well.

Nevertheless, I don't think this is a good idea for multiple languages. It would be much more logical to separate different languages by folders, as Jacob suggested. This also has the advantage that Google may choose to display sitelinks in the search results (a list of languages).

I must disagree. From all the research I have done lately, all opinions are that you should NOT hide content.

...and this research is? If by "research", you mean reading the superstitions of loudmouth SEO's -- then no thanks. Bunch of shysters.

If you mean actual experiments, or direct advice from Google, than that would be more interesting.

And by the way: my "hidden" text appears in the Google results. For example, try this search: smash defence. I'm #1 out of 1,860,000 results. On that page, all the content is hidden if you select the beginner skill view.

Admittedly, I don't hide content by default -- my default skill setting is "advanced", which has everything -- but that's more out of concern for my users than for Google.

You should expect Google to ignore your CSS and javascript completely, unless you somehow trigger their SE-spam alarms. I assume they have methods of analysing CSS/JS when they deem it necessary (that is, to detect cheats).

When google visits your site it has the default settings in use and like you said, it's advanced and everything is visible. So basicly google doesn't detect your hidden content. It's visible when google visits your site. That's the way I see this.

Actually, that's not true either.

I have some text that is hidden by default (it's hints for users without CSS). Much to my annoyance, Google actually found that text, and showed it in the page description! "Your browser is not using stylesheets; consequently, none of these preferences will work." Damn.

I've since added <meta> descriptions, which Google has chosen instead.

If the text is in your source code, Google can find it. The Google spider reads your HTML source code, not your CSS (although I imagine Google can work out what's hidden if it wants to).

Besides, do you think Google could be fooled that easily? A spammer could just use 1 line of javascript to hide all his SE spam text, and Google would be none the wiser (because it was visible "by default")? I don't think so. I think Google's smarter than that.

Of course google can find all the source code but does it use those hidden elements in search results?

It did for my pages.

Good to know and when it does that it's easy to see why hidden content can be considered "illegal".

Exactly. Hidden content is indexed by Google, but may not be visible to users. This gives hidden content the potential to be search-engine spam.

But it's only potential. Google isn't going to ban you for offering CSS-based content customisation; they're smarter than that. Most likely, they'll analyse hidden content and determine whether it matches common patterns of keyword-spam. If it does, you're in trouble; if not, you should be fine.

I guess it's hard to know exactly what Google does. However, hiding content is a bad idea if you care about your rankings. This can be considered a cloaking technique to improve your rankings by Google and other search engines.



Now, hiding a web pages content from a user, and delivering other content, optimized for a search engine spider is not a good idea. Likewise, showing one page to a search engine spider and a different page to a human visitor is also frowned upon by search engines, because it's deceptive. Depending on how cloaking is used, sites may be penalized by search engines.

However, cloaking does have valid uses as Mike pointed out. It's just knowing when you are in the right, and knowing when you are in the wrong. I personally know of the research that Linda was talking about which has been done by Aaron Wall a highly respected search engine optimizer. I would recommend anyone considering cloaking to read "The Definitive Guide to Cloaking".

http://www.ihategoogle.org/index_bblog.php?postid=508

Fortunately, it's not that hard to work out.

• Are you using cloaking as an attempt to improve your SE rankings?
  • Yes --> Uh oh. You're skating on thin ice; I hope you know what you're doing.
  • No --> You should be fine. No guarantees, but hey -- you might get hit by a bus tomorrow. Stop being paranoid (although I don't like the look of that man peering over your shoulder).