Does google index pages with hidden divs?

Question

I am starting to redesign and develop a site that contains a lot of text and I am thinking of ways to organize the information on the site so that it looks cleaner. On some parts of the site I would like to implement a jquery toggle effect where some content is placed in a hidden div and that content will show or hide depending on a user's onclick event.

Would this technique of organizing content greatly harm the SEO of the site? At what point would google start viewing this as spam and drop the site from being indexed all together?

//Update - found some answers.

I guess to clarify, as a response to some answers below, the purpose of the hidden divs would be to toggle between showing/hiding the content for organizational purpose where any hidden text would eventually be shown to the user.

However, after much digging around, Matt Cutts from google does pretty much say that as long as you are not keyword stuffing your hidden text and abusing the system by trying to trick the googlebot, you should generally be fine. He also gives a funny example of keyword stuffing gone wrong.

Answer 1

Poe's idea of using an "off stage" div (negative position) is widely used and is as well known to the Google bot as a div with display:hidden or visibility:none.

Here's how to do it:

Have all of your objects totally displayed and completely visible and right on stage in your HTML code, just as Google wants.... but THEN... have your javascript onload event apply the positioning that you want in the browser client.

The result... perfect SEO, and a perfect experience for the visitor.

Answer 2

I wouldn't hide it. If people don't want to read it they can skip over. When I've hidden text it doesn't seem to be seen by the Googlebot as well as text within regular html.