Turning off body copy in Mobile View - Hurt SEO?

Hi

Quick question regarding turning off sections of body copy within a mobile view to improve visitors experience, by limiting excessive scrolling. Am I in effect hurting my SEO? I am in the cloud with the inner working of how webflow is designed.

My fear is Google Bot’s are missing my content. I welcome any comments.

Thanks
Chris

From my understanding Google now reads your HTML, CSS and JS files in an attempt to better understand your site. It really depends what you are hiding and why. You have to be very careful, if you are hiding body text that the page still properly represents the same information to all users. Google will not care if you are hiding a hero image from phones to increase load times. But if it feels you are hiding substantive content from some users it might penalize you. The best thing to do is to try your best to consistently represent your site to all users, hook your site up to webmaster tools and see if you get any warnings.

I would caution you, if your reason for hiding body text it to prevent scrolling, and therefor provide a better user experience. From my experience user expect to be able to scroll, and in some instances scroll for a very long time. Nothing is worse then making assumptions about what a mobile user wants to see vs a desktop user wants to see. If the text you are serving to desktop user is high quality and relevant then it should be served in the same way to mobile users. On the other hand if you can cut down the copy for your mobile users and still get your point across you should consider using your mobile copy for your other users as well.

I would love to hear other peoples thoughts on this.

Hi, you can add your site to Google Webmaster Tools and see the same that Google sees.

David
I really wish to thank you. I see this SEO section on the Forum does not get many posts. I agree with what you’re saying. I had some negative feedback ‘too much scrolling on a phone’ and I took those comments to heart. But something just was not sitting right in my mind which is why I thought of creating this post.

So, I’m off to adjust the mobile view settings of my body copy…it’s all legit, I don’t play silly SEO tricks. Google is smart & it scares me.

Thanks again

Hmmm,
Silly me I totally forgot about doing that.

Many thanks for the refreshing idea.
Chris