I’m looking to be integrating jQuery into my website with a slide out panel that, by default, is hidden. When a user clicks on “Join”, a div slides down with the features of the site and a registration form. “Login” would do the same, and provide a login form.

Was wondering what kind of repercussions this has on Google, if any at all, regarding the initially hidden elements.

Close to none, I should think. Google really isn’t going to value your registration or login form that much. If we are talking about other content, it would be possible to include it in the source code (which is what Google sees, really), but have it initally in a hidden div.

As an example, if you Google ‘expressionengine modular by design’ it returns a result from page one, and that text is hidden by default.

Apparantly Google can/will penalise you if you hide big chunks of text where that text isn’t relevant to your site or stuffed with keyword spam. Whether that’s true or not, who knows - either way, you shouldn’t have a problem with your need.

jQuery doesn’t itself hurt SEO - it is how you use it.

Generally it is a good idea to view the page with JavaScript turned off as this is largely believed how Google sees it.

You can use JavaScript to hide or remove elements from the DOM at this point.

If you check the page in a text browser like Lynx and see how it looks with JavaScript turned off you should see what Google will get.

Unobtrusive JavaScript is the way forward for SEO!

Opera has a really nice ‘all the frills turned off’ mode - user mode I think it was called (or author more). That was what I used to use Opera for! Renders the page with a ‘Commodore 64-esque’ blue background for good measure.