What is hidden mobile content for SEO?

Hidden content on mobile devices may not get indexed vs fully visible content. A Googler recently stated that hidden content may be ok but if it is critical then it should be visible. There is a term “content cloaking” that means even though the text is hidden to users, search engines could still crawl it. But that’s no longer the case – search engines are much more sophisticated and better at detecting spam tactics.

Why hide text?

Following are some reasons for why some SEO specialist hide the text:

• Including keywords they can not show to the public: Some people use competitors keywords in their text to rank high in search engine result pages. As they can not show these keywords in their text due to legal compliance, corporate marketing policies, or stealthy SEO approaches. So that is why they hide these keywords in their text. 

• Keyword spamming the page: Some people believe in using one keyword many times on a page to increase the ranking for that keyword. This may have been an effective strategy in ancient SEO age but not today.

• Hiding links: Links are strong ranking factors. Many sites used to get links from other sites that were hidden. These links were hidden because oftentimes they were unrelated to the content on the site where they were posted.

What is helpful supplementary SEO content? 

Any content that improves the user experience on a web page can be termed as supplementary content. The supporting material present on a web page that does not necessarily help with understanding the main subject but contains relevant, additional, or complementary information that helps improve the customer experience is called supplementary content. Google wants to drive traffic to web pages that have quality content as well as content that is useful to users for the subject they are searching for. For this purpose, Google gives a lot of importance to supplementary content.

Types of supplementary content: 

A wide array of content types can be classified as supplementary content.

These include suggestions for posts and comments sections of the blog, rich cards, or embedded tweets in-between the content on the website, navigation links on the site, etc. A few of the types are as below:

• Photo or video uploaded within the content: Photos and videos added to your blog posts  help to break the flow of your text content body. They add to the  readability and are visually appealing thus increasing engagement. Supplementary content goes beyond static photos and visuals. They should add to the value of the page and should be a complete entity in itself. The advantage of images is that they help increase your content’s footprint in the SERPs.

• Embedded social post: Relevant social media posts embedded in your page gives it an added edge of interactivity along with making it visually appealing. It surely provides additional information related to your subject of the page. Embedding posts from your own social media handles could result in increased reach of your social profiles to the audience.

• Call to action buttons: Call to action buttons guide users in the direction where they would find their next piece of content that might be useful to them. It is always a wise step to give your audience an option of taking the next logical step. These CTA can be incorporated in the form of ads in between your content’s body. They help break the continuity of plain text and attract the attention of the user to the ad.

• Header/navigation menu bar: The navigation menu which is generally at the top of any page is also considered as supplementary content. This is because that makes it simpler for the user to navigate between the pages on the website with greater ease.

Examples of supplementary content from various types of websites:

• News article page
• Video pages
• E-commerce pages
• Blog post page

SEO Content Hidden Behind Tabs

The content hidden in tabs on mobile pages, Google will use this for indexing and ranking but will not show that in the snippets in the search results. So this is a Google ranking factor. 

Number of outbound links for SEO

Outbound links are those links that send the visitor from your website to other sites across the internet. Outbound links are also known as external links. These are used to verify facts, backup sources, or simply point people toward resources.

Types of outbound links: There are two types of outbound links: dofollow and nofollow.

Syntax: rel=”nofollow”into the HTML of the link.

Nofollow tells the search engines not to follow links.

Dofollow links pass on ranking power from your website to the targeted page. 

     Nofollow links should be a minority of your outbound links. Nofollow links essentially break the chain between your site and the source you’re sending people to. This can be useful, even valuable, in navigating some of the finer points of SEO algorithms, and general etiquette.

When you should use nofollow:

Paid links: Google can penalize you, if people buy links on your site. These penalties can harm your ranking.

Links in comments: Defaulting these to nofollow means spammers putting links to disreputable sites can’t get credit from your site, which if they’re found to be fraudulent, can also result in penalties against your site.

User-generated content:  If you allow guest posts or user-generated content on your site, no-follow links can prevent you from inadvertently “vouching” for the content. This is a great bit of insurance from a PR perspective, too. It’s one thing to host an open space to communicate ideas, but another entirely to promote and endorse controversial or offensive material.

Embeds: it’s good to embed content from other sources, but if you aren’t fully behind the wider content and you’re only using an excerpt, nofollow links can help save readers’ time by not sending them off to an otherwise low-quality piece of material.

Why are outbound links important?

1. They increase relevance: Search engines get ideas about your from the links that you link and how. They can learn a lot of things about your site from the outbound links. You can provide them information about your business, about your services, your competitors and what kind of problems you solve via outbound links. It can help search engines to crawl your site and build trust. They also help to structure the web.
2. They improve reputation: When you include links to relevant and high authority sources, you can boost your own reputation in the process. 
3. You can boost value: The most important thing is the quality content that will differentiate you from your competitors and linking to other quality content provides a fast, instant value-boost for your readers.
4. It encourages backlinks: The best to connect with other companies, websites, journals, and bloggers, out bounds links are the best option. Appreciating their work will encourage them to do in turn and more other websites engage with and link to your site, higher up the search engine result pages you will go.