How bad is it to use display: none in CSS?

pasta_paul

I've heard many times that it's bad to use display: none for SEO reasons, as it could be an attempt to push in irrelevant popular keywords. A few questions: Is that still received wisdom? Does it make a difference if you're only hiding a single word, or perhaps a single character? If you should avoid any use of it, what are the preferred techniques for hiding (in situations where you need it to become visible again on certain conditions)? Some...

Originally asked by Andy on Stack Exchange (webmasters) (CC BY-SA 3.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

In these days of jQuery (and other JavaScript frameworks) heavy websites then I can't see how it can be a problem, since it's used extensively when you use things like jQuery sliders, transitions, galleries, tickers etc. These are now commonplace and search-engines are clever enough not to blindly penalise their use. A user RainboRick states this in the Google Webmaster Central forum : Merely using display:none will not automatically trigger a penalty. The key is whether or not there is a mechanism - either automatic or one that is invoked by the user - to make the content visible. Google is becoming very adept at processing JavaScript to find and interpret such mechanisms. If you use valid...

Full answer by Dan Diplo: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/1384 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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