Many webmasters want to hide content on a mobile page for many reasons, to make a page look cleaner, to not bombard a visitor with masses of text, or simply to make it easier for a visitor to find what they are looking for with the ability to click on which part they’d like more information on.
But, all SEOs know that hidden content is a no-no when it comes to Google… so is there any impact when it comes to hiding content for mobile users? The answer is no… but only if you implement it correctly.
As long as the content you are hiding on the mobile-friendly version of the site is the same content on the desktop site – and that content is visible on desktop – it won’t hurt SEO for the page.
Hidden content can be discounted in ranking, but if the content is visible on the desktop version of your site, we can crawl it and use the information for ranking your mobile site as well since we can share indexing signals between the desktop and mobile versions.
So as long as you are ensuring the hidden content on mobile is visible on the desktop version, you should be good to go. And if it is done through two different URLs, remember to cross reference them appropriately so Google knows they are the same.
Jennifer Slegg
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Andrew Shotland says
This makes sense Jennifer. We have done a fair amount of testing on different content between desktop and mobile URLs and as long as you have bi-directional tagging set up, Google seems to apply the content from the desktop URL to the mobile URL, even if it is not present on the mobile URL.