Q:

SEO - Hidden content before main site content

I have a two hidden divs before my main site content, one with the login form and another with the signup form. I then have login and signup buttons within the page that use JQuery to show or hide these divs. I like the effect this setup offers, dropping down from the top of the page and pushing the rest of the content down.
However, recently I have been getting serious about SEO and I am wondering if these divs have been affecting my SERP rankings. Basically, every non-logged page (everything bots see) has the same two display:none; divs at the top of the document flow. Is it bad? Should I re-engineer these forms and the way they are displayed?

A:

You may want to have a look at this question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2417475/seo-does-google-bot-see-text-in-hidden-divs which is pointing to the Google Webmaster guidelines on the following text

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

But I have also read that Google is able to process the javascript and understand the content. In the same field, this is why it may affect the SERP ranking because Google is really serious about cloaking if the web site is suspected to have a really different content for bots.

