Accordion Fold Ups Bad For Google

[OOMDODigital]

http://fandicoach.com/products

Right now I have these accordion things on the website. Are they bad for google in terms of being an SEO best practice? I want to avoid doing anything black hat.

Thanks!

[Christy-Correll]

Great responses, everyone. Thanks! What did you decided to do, OOMDO?

[DougRoberts]

Interesting. Thanks for sharing that.

[EGOL]

I was originally using on-page anchor links like this...

Brass Widgets

In my opinion these are some of the most powerful on-page optimization elements that you can use, ranking just below the title tag in their effectiveness.   Perhaps removing them caused the rankings drop and putting them back caused the rankings recovery?

[DougRoberts]

As far as the user experience goes I think you're right. I've seen some horrible examples and personally I'd avoid using them. I think you have to ask yourself what the actual benefit to the visitor is and be realistic about your answer.

The quicker you can get the information the visitor is looking for in front of them the better.

Even if you think it's the way to go It's definably worth testing to make sure you're not throwing away conversions and killing your visitor engagement.

I'm not sure how it would harm your long tail after all, the content is still there and indexed?

[EGOL]

I stopped using these types of pages.

In my opinion my long tail traffic suffered and visitor engagement dropped.

Same content before and after...

This was not an extensive text.  Just a few pages.  But I am not using them anymore.  Instead I am going to build bigass pages, which any noob will know how to use... and will appear more content rich to people who visit.

[DougRoberts]

You shouldn't have a problem. Google will be able to index the page just fine. Using Javascript and CSS to hide/reveal content like this is not a problem.

If you do have concerns that google might not be able to see part of a page you can always used the fetch as googlebot option in Google Webmaster Tools. (it's under Health), Once the page has been fetched you can click on the Fetch Status (normally "Success") and see the html that google saw.

In this specific case it's really not a problem for Google.

[KevinBudzynski]

Probably nothing to worry about (Google will index content in hidden divs). The first post was just a rule of thumb.

Can any other mozzer's chime in?

[OOMDODigital]

http://www.pricetoyotaservice.com/explore-services.html

Okay here's a page in question that we're working on. The first one uses the hidden text div. If we view it with Javascript turned off the div does not uncollapse and they can't see the content. Is this really that big of an issue?

[lagunaitech]

I wouldn't consider the accordion good or bad for SEO. It's just a way of displaying your product information and has more to do with creating an organized and user friendly product list.

When Google crawls your site, all it sees is a page with your products listed and a description, not the actual accordion.

I see no problem with it as long as it's good relevant content like your product list is.

[KevinBudzynski]

A good rule of thumb is if you can see all the "hidden" content if Javascript is turned off you are basically safe.