Do "Read More" buttons negatively affect SEO?

[Sutra]

Just got off the phone with a Tabool rep. Pushy dude.

Anyway, he said that to monetize my mobile traffic better he want to implement a sitewide "Read More" button. So about the first 1/4 of the page will be readable by a user but to read the rest, they have to press the Read More button. After the press the button the last 3/4 will be viewable.

Do you guys know if that will negatively affect SEO? Will it prevent search engines from seeing the bottom 3/4 of the page?

I asked the rep and he said it does not affect SEO. But seeing as how pushy he is I feel like he might say anything to get more Taboola shit on my page.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Depends on if it's loading a page-2, applying a jQuery CSS attribute like .hide and then removing it, or trying to dynamically load it with Ajax. It all depends on the method. I'm guessing it's going to be jQuery. But what you can do is view the source code before clicking "read more" and see if it shows the entire post in the HTML or not. If it does then you're all good.

 

[Calamari]

he might say anything to get more Taboola shit on my page.

True story. Don't take their word for it.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Yeah, it sounds like he wants to get the Taboola ads higher up the page by hiding the content and bringing the bottom of the post upwards.

 

[animalstyle]

I recently read that Google gives more prominence to things that are displayed by default on your page vs hidden. IE if you have a bunch of tabs with content, the tab that is defaulted open would be the most important info for your users to see and therefore more important in the eyes of the crawler.

Something to consider when you have a 1000 word article and only show the first 250 words to the user in order to move ads higher up the page.

Unless you're doing this to show multiple articles on a page and make it easier to scroll through them then I don't see how this could benefit a readers experience which is basically the whole idea behind SEO.

If this dude is being pushy its because he spends his day catching resistance to shit like this - which says something IMO

 

[Stephen]

Didn't Google recently state that content that is not visible to the user will not be used by Google, as many sites were using tabbed or accordion style formatting to roll in more content for SEO.

 

[dresden]

If you're going to be doing ajax, make sure to use pushState() and popState() to generate crawlable urls for each, if they're going to a new page.

Lots of major media sites do this and perform just fine in gnews and organics. I would recommend using css first and foremost, but you can do it the other way too.

 

[Darth]

I was looking at doing this too but never got around to it... let me know if you find a Wordpress plugin that can do it easily