Google crawls the HTML of websites, and not only the visible text on our pages. This means, for Google to know if an element is hidden via CSS, it needs to also look at your CSS files. As modern WordPress templates have a lot of CSS code, it makes sense for Google to skip this step. It follows that we can hide heading tags via CSS and have them included as a ranking factor. In this test, we check if hidden heading tags can help in improving rank.
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Transcription Below
This is my Marc Moeller, he is one of our new testers. What he is looking at is he’s going to hide htags with CSS. The idea is, they do not appear on the page but they are actually listed as htags. There is this class, no display. The no display is not going to display the text. Within the code, you can actually see them – they exist in the source code but when you look at the page, they do not show the visitor.
We know that Google is basically crawling the source code or the rendered dom, if you will. You can see those items but they are “hidden”, are they going to improve rank? In this test, he did not get any movement. He started things in the 6th spot and it stayed in the 6th spot. We did not get any movement there but something that was super cool was that, if you search for it, it showed up in the metadescription.
What that means in this test is that, Google is crawling this and Google is seeing it. We did not get any movement but I think that could be because there were a lot of factors on this page and I mentioned that in my note. There are a lot of other signals that he had on the page and it is likely that they were simply masking those hidden htags.
I know that a bunch of people actually run these tests on their own, if you decide to do that, use fewer factors on the page, smaller pages, and hide these h2s and h3s, and I have a good feeling that you are going to see movement and the reason that I have a good feeling about that is because it is showing up in the serps so Google is clearly taking it into consideration.
For this particular test, I think the reason we didn’t get movement is because there was too much going on in the page. I think this is a very valid way to get h2s and h3s counted if you don’t want them to be seen. Now this is of course, cloaking and this violates Google’s guidelines so that is one of your concerns, you don’t want to do it that way but if that isn’t one of your concerns, this is something you could definitely do.