SEO penalty by hiding text for sighted people but not for screenreaders

SEO penalty by hiding text for sighted people but not for screenreaders - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about seo, google-search, css, accessibility to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about SEO penalty by hiding text for sighted people but not for screenreaders.Problem :

Let’s say I have this setup:

HTML:

<a href="#" class="menu_links"><span class="hidetext">Graphic </span>Design</a>

CSS:

.hidetext 
  height: 1px;
  width: 1px;
  position: absolute;
  overflow: hidden;
  top: -10px;

It will only display "Design" for sighted people and when you toggle CSS off, it will show "Graphic Design".

Is this bad/good for SEO? And will you get a penalty via Google by doing this?

Solution :

Your goal is excellent, and I think the approach you are looking for is already existent in CSS as @media and display.

One option

HTML

<a href="#" class="menu_links"><span class="hidetext">Graphic </span>Design</a>

CSS

@media screen 
 span.hidetext {
  display: none;
 }


@media aural 
 span.hidetext {
  display: inline;
 }

Useful references

1. CSS Media Types


2. CSS display Property


3. If IE prior to 8.0 is important to you, you might want HTML5 Shiv

Second option

Serve different HTML based on the media type. If you do that, you will probably want to use the alternative meta element.

I don't think your site can be penalized for this even if it's not a good practice.

However, you should know this kind of practice on the entire link is not allowed at all. Indeed, Google penalizes when an entire link is hidden for users but not for Googlebot. You can read the Google support page for more details.

If the issue about seo, google-search, css, accessibility is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.