Can I add keywords to a hidden column, that will work in the search function?

Hi,

thanks for your question, and sorry for the trouble.

Yes, something like is possible, you’ll just have to use a different way of hiding that column. When using the “Hide” button on the “Edit” screen, the column will not be part of the actual HTML output, and therefore the search function won’t see it.

Instead, you can simply hide it with some CSS code. For that, please try adding this to the “Custom CSS” on the “Plugin Options” screen of TablePress:

.tablepress-id-123 .column-4 {
  display: none;
}

Change the table ID and column number as necessary, and don’t forget to make the column visible on the “Edit” screen again.

Regards,
Tobias

Can I hijack this please as the other was closed.

Do you have any experience of the hidden column text, that is present in code but not on page, throwing up any search engine penalties? For instance, I’m about to include contents from within 400 packages as a list, which can be seen in the html and therefore probably by search engines as well. I could block the page, but that defeats the objective of the actual page.

Thanks again
Lee

Hi Lee,

I’m not aware of any search engine penalties due to this. Search engines don’t interpret CSS or JS, so they don’t actually know if certain content is visible to the user or not. Thus, those 400 packages in your table should be picked up by the search engine just fine.

Regards,
Tobias