Will I be penalized for hidden content if I have text in a "read more" dropdown?

Today's question comes from Jim Jim asks regarding hidden content.

My site has a Read more dropdown window to coexist with the simplistic design elements.

The box contains optimized content, keyword anchor text linking deeper into the site, et cetera.

Will I be penalized for this alternatives?

So here are the things to be aware of.

Number one, let's sketch out the bad side first.

So if the bad side is if your drop down is one Pixel long and one Pixel deep, and the thing that gets revealed when you click on it is like eight pages filled with keyword stuff, anchor text and things like that, that's going to look pretty bad if, however, you're fitting within the normal Idiom where you have a navigation menu and you click and is revealed, maybe a paragraph or two, maybe a link or two.

That's the sort of thing that a lot of different websites do.

So this is the sort of thing where I would pay attention to what other websites do.

If you use a common framework to do your drop down that a lot of other websites use, then there's less likelihood that we might accidentally classify it as hidden text.

And then it would also really probably be a good idea notto put, like, eight pages of content in the stuff that people don't normally see, because what you want people to see is the same content that Google bought is seen.

So you don't want to land on a page that has nothing on it and have a whole bunch of text hidden behind a drop down.

But most normal sites doing most normal sort of mouse activated drop downs are doing a completely normal amount of stuff.

And that's not the sort of thing that I would really worry about as long as you stick to common Idioms the way that most websites do those sorts of drop downs, as long as you keep it to a relatively reasonable length of text.

I don't foresee any problems.

You.