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Was not allowed to post this in the place I posted it originally as "too general" and was redirected to this Forum

I have read a lot of SO and other (also google) articles talking about hiding content and when it will be penalising and not the site.

In some articles I read hiding (we are talking about visibility: hidden in this case) is penalising your site when the content hidden is "keywords" but not if it is meaningful content for the user (lets say in a tab or such). On other articles again I read that google doesn't really care wether the content is hidden and just gives it less weight.

In this specific case I have to visibility: hidden a section of the page inside a div where content (that is already present on the page for the human reader) is laid out in a different structure ready for print() with JS that content to a PDF. I cannot use the exact same content and especially layout as already used on the page for human reader, it must instead be in laid out differently, and some of the page's content will not be used in the PDF.

Will the site be penalised because some content is duplicated (the title, and some tables present on the page with product attributes), or is it OK to hide the content with visibility: hidden ? I cannot use display:none because Js print() will not be able to print that. It is however able to print visibility: hidden content.

I could see only one other possible solution which is to pull with AJAX once the user press the "print" button, so the "hidden" content is initially not even present on the page, however I would like to avoid this, if possible.

Will search engines consider this keyword stuffing and penalise the site? Is there some HTML tag I can use to tell the robots "do not consider this chunk of HTML?" Perhaps a "Print Only" statement, or else?

  • Search engines don't penalize entire sites for duplicating content between pages.When search engines find two pages on your site that have the same content, they just pick one of the two to index. – Stephen Ostermiller Apr 05 '21 at 11:01
  • Thanks, but this is not what I asked or outlined.

    The content is not duplicated over pages, it is inside the same page and hidden with visibility CSS statement.

    I see the question was closed as duplicate however this is not the case either. The question marked as duplicate is not even close to the problem outlined here, and the comment above is not related either.

    I am asking about content hidden on the page with CSS for print-only purpose

     –  Apr 05 '21 at 11:05
  • Duplicating content within the same pages no more of a problem duplicating it between pages. Google just ignores the second instance of text. The only time Google penalizes for duplicate content is when you're copying it from other sites and trying to pass it off as your own content. – Stephen Ostermiller Apr 05 '21 at 12:24
  • OK this helps thank you @StephenOstermiller. –  Apr 05 '21 at 12:39

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