Will search engines penalise my site for using hidden text in an honest way?

[Ardent]

I am developing a site that requires a fair few categories and would like to use a drop down CSS / javascript menu, I am just slightly unclear as to whether search engines will penalize me for using display:none to initially hide the menu sections, any advice?

Secondly pretty much the same thing, I have a certain type of page on the site that will hold a lot of information and ideally I would like to use tabbed areas to allow users to view the information in convenient chunks, this will of course involve hiding the divs ( css / javascript ) for those areas that are not under the active tab. Again will hiding the content from users, even though they can of course view all the content by clicking the relevant tab, be considered spamming ( or whatever it is called ) by the search engines?

Thanks for any help.

[cooluks]

I am developing a site that requires a fair few categories and would like to use a drop down CSS / javascript menu, I am just slightly unclear as to whether search engines will penalize me for using display:none to initially hide the menu sections, any advice?

Secondly pretty much the same thing, I have a certain type of page on the site that will hold a lot of information and ideally I would like to use tabbed areas to allow users to view the information in convenient chunks, this will of course involve hiding the divs ( css / javascript ) for those areas that are not under the active tab. Again will hiding the content from users, even though they can of course view all the content by clicking the relevant tab, be considered spamming ( or whatever it is called ) by the search engines?

Thanks for any help.

SEs frowned or penalizes those sites that uses hidden texts.. Hiding texts is considered as Black Hat technique.... Hiding from human or visitors the texts but in SEs when they crawled your site they can see it...

[Chris]

I wouldn't worry. Typically what'll happen in cases with complex CSS causing text to be hidden, is if the SEs can even detect it, all it'll do is raise a flag for a human to come by and make a judgement call. They know that it is a typical programming necessity and won't make an automatic ban out of it.