Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does collapsing content impact Google SEO signals?
-
Recently I have been promoting custom long form content development for major brand clients. For UX reasons we collapse the content so only 2-3 sentences of the first paragraph are visible. However there is a "read more" link that expands the entire content piece.
I have believed that the searchbots would have no problem crawling, indexing and applying a positive SEO signal for this content. However I'm starting to wonder. Is there any evidence that the Google search algorithm could possible discount or even ignore collapsed content? -
Thanks EGOL. Still looking for additional evidence about this.
-
well.. yup. I know many SEOs that do think that the collapsable are is just not important enough for google to consider it
good luck
-
If I see a study, I'll post a link here.
-
Yep I completely agree with your response. Unfortunately I'm in a position where I manage major enterprise accounts with multiple stakeholders (including some people are not educated in SEO). Every major change we propose needs to be documented, cited and reviewed. When making an argument for content expansion I would need to use thorough research example (Moz study, documentation on search engine land, etc).
Anyway thank for taking the time to share your feedback and advice on this thread. Although this is not the answer I wanted to hear (i.e. Google doesn't respect collapsed content)...however it's very likely accurate. This is a serious SEO issue that needs to be addressed.
-
Are there any case studies about this issue?
Just the one that I published above. The conclusion is... be prepared to sacrifice 80% of your traffic if you hide your valuable content behind a preview.
I would be asking the UX people to furnish studies that hiding content produces better sales.
We have lots of people raving about the abundance of content on our site, the detailed product descriptions, how much help we give them to decide what to purchase. All of this content is why we dominate the SERPs in our niche and that, in many people's eyes, is a sign of credibility. Lots of people say... "we bought from you because your website is so helpful". However, if we didn't have all of this content in the open these same people would have never even found us.
Nobody has to read this stuff. I would rather land on a website and see my options than land on a website and assume that they was no information because I didn't notice that the links to open it were in faded microfont because the UX guys wanted things to be tidy. I believe that it is a bigger sin to have fantastic content behind a clickthorugh than it is to put valuable information in the open and allow people to have the opportunity to read it.
Putting our content out in the open is what makes our reputation.
I sure am glad that I am the boss here. I can make the decisions and be paid on the basis of my performance.
-
We are applying 500 to 800+ word custom content blocks for our client landing pages (local landing pages) that shows a preview of the first paragraph and a "read more" expansion link. We know that most website visitors only care about the location info of these particular landing pages. We also know that our client UX teams would certainly not approve an entire visible content block on these pages.
Are there any case studies about this issue? I'm trying to find a bona fide research project to help back up our argument. -
It was similar to a Q&A. There was a single sentence question and a paragraph of hidden answer. This page had a LOT of questions and a tremendous amount of keywords in the hidden content. Thousands of words.
The long tail traffic tanked. Then, when we opened the content again the traffic took months to start coming back. The main keywords held in the SERPs. The longtail accounted for the 80% loss.
-
How collapsed was your content? Did you hide the entire block? Only show a few sentences? I'm trying to find a research article about this. This is a MAJOR issue to consider for our SEO campaigns.
-
Yes that is a very legitimate concern of mine. We have invested significant resources into custom long form content for our clients and we are very concerned this all for nothing...or possibly worse (discounting content).
-
Recently i a had related issue with a top ranking website for very competitive queries.
Unfortunately the product department made some changes to the content (UI only) without consulting SEO department. The only worth to mention change they made was to move the first two paragraphs into a collapsible DIV showing only the first 3 lines + a "read more" button. The text in collapsible div was crawlable and visible to SE's. (also it's worth to mention that these paragrap
But the site lost its major keywords positions 2-3 days later.Of-course we reverted the changes back but still two months later, the keywords are very slowly moving back to their "original" positions.
For years i believed in what Google stated, that you can use collapsible content if you are not trying to inject keywords or trying to inflate the amount of content etc. Not anymore.
I believe that placing the content under a collapsible div element, we are actually signaling google that this piece of content is not that important (that's why it is hidden, right? Otherwise it should be in plain sight). So why we should expect from google to take this content as a major part of our contents ranking factor weight.
-
About two years ago I had collapsed content on some important pages. Their longtail traffic went into a steady slide, but the head traffic held. I attribute this to a sign that the collapsed content was discounted, removing it from, or lowering its ability to count in the rankings for long tail queries.
I expanded the page, making all content visible. A few months later, longtail traffic started to slowly rise. It took many months to climb back to previous levels.
After this, every word of my content is now in the open.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does content in collapsible menus negatively affect SEO or featured snippets?
We want to confirm whether content in collapsible menus negatively affects SEO and/or featured snippets on Google. We're hoping to add a menu to answer some frequently asked questions and attract featured snippets, while also creating a positive user experience/not clogging up the page. Here is an example of the style of menu we're using now, the troubleshooting menu: http://www.lynden.com/help/index.html Appreciate your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanD.1 -
Lightboxes and SEO
Do lightboxes (AKA popup boxes when you click "learn more" type CTAs) have any negative effect on SEO? We are looking at revamping our sites to have more of a tiled approach, and a lightbox with summary content popping out with additional CTAs, directing to pages with more information or free trial pages. Is there any downside to this approach from an organic perspective? is there anything specific to keep in mind when creating these if not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
Does content revealed by a 'show more' button get crawled by Google?
I have a div on my website with around 500 words of unique content in, automatically when the page is first visited the div has a fixed height of 100px, showing a couple of hundred words and fading out to white, with a show more button, which when clicked, increases the height to show the full content. My question is, does Google crawl the content in that div when it renders the page? Or disregard it? Its all in the source code. Or worse, do they consider this cloaking or hidden content? It is only there to make the site more useable for customers, so i don't want to get penalised for it. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOhmygod0 -
SEO Impact of External links in JS tag
We have our JS tag and iframe tag being used over by 100 leading websites. What would be the SEO impact if we added a follow link in the iframe. Would it have any negative impact ? Vivek
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kvivek050 -
SEO impact difference between a URL Rewrite and 301 redirect
Hi guys and girls! Just putting a new site live, we changed the URL from one thing to another and I created a 301 file redirecting the urls like for like. The developer installing it has created a different file with columns like: RewriteRule ^page/ http://www.site/page [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^/page/ http://www.site/page [R=301,L] What's the difference? The page redirects but is there a difference between the 301 redirect and this URL rewrite in terms of SEO and link value?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shloy23-2945840 -
Will Google View Using Google Translate As Duplicate?
If I have a page in English, which exist on 100 other websites, we have a case where my website has duplicate content. What if I use Google Translate to translate the page from English to Japanese, as the only website doing this translation will my page get credit for producing original content? Or, will Google view my page as duplicate content, because Google can tell it is translated from an original English page, which runs on 100+ different websites, since Google Translate is Google's own software?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
How does google recognize original content?
Well, we wrote our own product descriptions for 99% of the products we have. They are all descriptive, has at least 4 bullet points to show best features of the product without reading the all description. So instead using a manufacturer description, we spent $$$$ and worked with a copywriter and still doing the same thing whenever we add a new product to the website. However since we are using a product datafeed and send it to amazon and google, they use our product descriptions too. I always wait couple of days until google crawl our product pages before i send recently added products to amazon or google. I believe if google crawls our product page first, we will be the owner of the content? Am i right? If not i believe amazon is taking advantage of my original content. I am asking it because we are a relatively new ecommerce store (online since feb 1st) while we didn't have a lot of organic traffic in the past, i see that our organic traffic dropped like 50% in April, seems like it was effected latest google update. Since we never bought a link or did black hat link building. Actually we didn't do any link building activity until last month. So google thought that we have a shallow or duplicated content and dropped our rankings? I see that our organic traffic is improving very very slowly since then but basically it is like between 5%-10% of our current daily traffic. What do you guys think? You think all our original content effort is going to trash?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | serkie1 -
Copying my Facebook content to website considered duplicate content?
I write career advice on Facebook on a daily basis. On my homepage users can see the most recent 4-5 feeds (using FB social media plugin). I am thinking to create a page on my website where visitors can see all my previous FB feeds. Would this be considered duplicate content if I copy paste the info, but if I use a Facebook social media plugin then it is not considered duplicate content? I am working on increasing content on my website and feel incorporating FB feeds would make sense. thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0