Scroll boxes any good for content additions?

I noticed a site on the net that has a scroll box on the homepage that allows you to view information about the site.

The great thing is not a great deal of space is actually taken, yet you can throw in lots of content which a user can scroll for if they want to see it..

Question is... does google still lay as much importance on the text in the scroll bar?

Where is the difference in scrolling the whole page and scrolling in the box? IMO, both is disturbing the visitor.

If you need to add information and you are not planing to spam, you can make another page with that information and link to it.

But yes, text in scroll box is the same as normal.

it still crawlable... so it doesn't matter...

I understand what you say, but the reason i mention it is because so many webmaster want to design an eye friendly homepage which, and lets be honest about this, usually wont look that great with a lot of text on it.

I don't want to spam my site, but it is very interesting that i can reduce the space taken on my homepage and yet still receive the same results.

It may look good to the designer's eye, but it's a pain for the user if they actually want to read what's there. You are making them work for it. But if it's something they would not want to work for to read, just keyword rich spamcilious content you want to hide... go for it, at their expense. People are still going to look to see if contains what they are interested in.

Your average user when they open a page will only see the top 500 pixels or so.. Put your "designy" stuff in this portion of the page (this portion is known as "above the fold") and then place your content text that makes your page much more relevant as far as a search engine is aware in the rest of the page (known as "below the fold").

You then get the best of both worlds (it looks nice when it first loads up to the human user) and the search engine spider when indexing the page sees lots of rich text content.

...and with css, you can position all your texty stuff above the fold in html, but below it on page.

Yes you can, though does this risk a penalty? or does google not care so long as the text is visible somewhere legitimately?

Actually, it may or may not be indexable. It really depends on how it is implemented. If the text is in a JavaScript (i.e., within <script></script> tags) it is not indexed, and not good for SEO. If it is just in a DIV tag with an ID and an external JavaScript is used to create the scrolling affect, it is SEO-friendly.

An Approach.

For every article that I write, I also write a short introduction (about 75 words). I don't copy the first 75 words but actually write a 75 word intro.

Two of these short introductions appear on the home page, in a column with a link for each to their respective pages.
As new articles are written the top intro moves to second position and the second intro moves to an other page specifically created for article intros. This page caries around five intros and as new intros are added new pages are created here.

In summary: Home page gets 75 word intro added.
A new page is created for that article.

The Summary articles page gets the older intro added and looses an intro to the second summary page and so on and so forth.

This method refreshes content on a few pages at a time...

In addition I use these intros on other pages that are relevant.

It goes without saying that every new article page has anchored keyword links from within it's text to the appropriate internal pages (at least three).

raz

Great to hear about real approaches...

It doesn't need any javascript, just two lines of CSS:

#scroll-box{
height:200px;
overflow:auto;
}

(I know that's technically 4 lines...)