[tccommerce]

I did some optimization on a site that used a Javascript navigation menu. None of the SEs were indexing any of the subpages pages after a number of months.

I hear that CSS-hidden text is a big SE no no, but I felt that in this case, it was justifiable to include a hidden div object with sitewide links with some good anchor text.

Another SEO told that Google is going to penalize the site (though its positioning and indexing has actually improved dramatically after the changes)

I guess I could've just done one visible link to a sitemap, or used [noscript] tags, but I wanted to be sure that Google picked it up.

Two questions for (much) more experienced SEOs:

1. Is Google really strict about this? I see hidden divs used for sliding drop down menus all the time. Surely Google recognizes this as a legitimate design function? Do they not want you to do it at all, or are they just again some porn site doing it and stuffing a bunch of keywords that have nothing to do with the real site content?


2. To try to mask the fact that the text is hidden, I created a separate stylesheet, placed it in a separate directory, and blocked it from being crawled with robots.txt. In the stylesheet I defined a div class called "htext" that is set to display:none. That way from the site index page, I could just say [div class="htext"]content[/div] instead of [div style="display:none"]

Will this prevent Google from interpreting it as hidden text?


I'm sure this is a common issue so I would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks to anyone who responds.