Can Google read content that is hidden under a "Read More" area?
-
For example, when a person first lands on a given page, they see a collapsed paragraph but if they want to gather more information they press the "read more" and it expands to reveal the full paragraph. Does Google crawl the full paragraph or just the shortened version?
In the same vein, what if you have a text box that contains three different tabs. For example, you're selling a product that has a text box with overview, instructions & ingredients tabs all housed under the same URL. Does Google crawl all three tabs?
Thanks for your insight!
-
Yes, for the most part. Google wants to deliver the best results for visitors based on their search query. So if something is hidden from initial view this would impact ux and especially if it's poorly implemented (not intuitive). As you know, original and compelling copy is the best. Unfortunately in many situations, such as a large ecommerce site, it is resource intensive. It's best to avoid thin content. However, it does get ranked as you can grab a snippet and place in Google and look at the results. So yes, it's possible that Google will rank these pages with duplicate content in a hidden view.
I would advise you to tell your client to remove any hidden content and rewrite product descriptions. Depending on resources, they may/may not want to do this. If they don't, at least you made a recommendation. Good luck!
-
Ok, that makes sense. And can that be applied to a text box with tabs?
Follow up to that - the situation is that I have a client hat doesn't have a lot of "original" content on their e-commerce page. It sounds like Google will take into account that content as "original" content but won't necessarily used it to build relevancy for any keywords hidden within. Is that correct?
-
I agree with Kevin in the answer above, the content may be crawled (depending on how you have hidden the paragraph using HTML) but Google may not give the right advantage of the content available after clicking the link.
We have a client with FAQ section with similar situation https://www.fairsplit.com/faqs/ , the website gets authority for the Question Titles of the FAQ section and not for the content as answer available after clicking the question.
I hope this helps, let me know if you have further questions.
Regards,
Vijay
-
The Googlebot will crawl this information. However, Google may elect not to index it or discount this content in its rankings.
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
-
How can I avoid duplicate content for a new landing page which is the same as an old one?
Hello mozers! I have a question about duplicate content for you... One on my clients pages have been dropping in search volume for a while now, and I've discovered it's because the search term isn't as popular as it used to be. So... we need to create a new landing page using a more popular search term. The page which is losing traffic is based on the search query "Can I put a solid roof on my conservatory" this only gets 0-10 searches per month according to the keyword explorer tool. However, if we changed this to "replacing conservatory roof with solid roof" this gets up to 500 searches per month. Muuuuch better! The issue is, I don't want to close down and re-direct the old page because it's got a featured snippet and sits in position 1. So I'd like to create another page instead... however, as the two are effectively the same content, I would then land myself in a duplicate content issue. If I were to put a rel="canonical" tag in the original "can I put a solid roof...." page but say the master page is now the new one, would that get around the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
SEO Implications of firewalls that block "foreign connections"
Hello! A client's IT security team has firewalls on the site with GEO blocking enabled. This is to prevent foreign connections to applications as part of a contractual agreements with their own clients. Does anyone have any experience with workarounds for this? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SimpleSearch0 -
How Can I Displace a Quora Q&A in a Google Featured Snippet?
Hello all. I'm looking for ideas for displacing a Quora Q&A as the featured snippet in google search results. I rank organically for the target term (it's a branded term, "urban airship pricing") in results 1, 2, 3 and 4. The Quora Q&A ranks 5, but is still getting the featured snippet. The Quora question, which is from 2013, is negative - essentially "why does Urban Airship cost so much." It was posed / someone answered the question before we restructured pricing, and added a free starter edition, so the information in the answer is incorrect. It's causing issues for our sales teams, there's a fair amount of volume around this term for us, and worst of all, it's making me mad 😉 I've considered the tactics listed below, but would love to know if anyone's done this, and what free or low-lost tactics work/where to focus efforts. Thanks in advance for help! -Jessica Tactics I'm Considering (Are some or all worth doing? Better ideas?) Create a pricing FAQ page on my website to try give Google a short answer to a query related to pricing that it might feature instead of the Quora Q&A Get a lot of folks to downvote the Quora question (and upvote the short answer we added). Although I'm worried that "activity" on the question might actually make things worse not better in terms of its visibility. Buy paid Google Adwords for the term so the featured snippet isn't quite so starkly featured (we were buying for this term, looking into why our ads aren't showing up at the moment) Talk about pricing on sites like Product Hunt or others (other ideas?) to see if they'll rank highly enough to add more/better content to page 1 results. Contact Quora and let them know that this outdated question is being pulled into a featured snippet and see if they'll do something about it (remove it, etc.) Provide feedback to Google (using the link under the snippet) that "something is wrong" or "this isn't useful"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpoundstone0 -
If I put a piece of content on an external site can I syndicate to my site later using a rel=canonical link?
Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please? What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website. Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO1 -
Are there any issues with search engines (other than Google/Bing) reading Protocol-Relative URLs?
Are there any issues with search engines (other than Google/Bing) reading Protocol-Relative URLs? Specifically with Baidu and Yandex?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WikiaSEO0 -
Google's Stance on "Hidden" Content
Hi, I'm aware Google doesn't care if you have helpful content you can hide/unhide by user interaction. I am also aware that Google frowns upon hiding content from the user for SEO purposes. We're not considering anything similar to this. The issue is, we will be displaying only a part of our content to the user at a time. We'll load 3 results on each page initially. These first 3 results are static, meaning on each initial page load/refresh, the same 3 results will display. However, we'll have a "Show Next 3" button which replaces the initial results with the next 3 results. This content will be preloaded in the source code so Google will know about it. I feel like Google shouldn't have an issue with this since we're allowing the user action to cycle through all results. But I'm curious, is it an issue that the user action does NOT allow them to see all results on the page at once? I am leaning towards no, this doesn't matter, but would like some input if possible. Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirmeliux0 -
Google is mixing subdomains. What can we do?
Hi! I'm experiencing something that's kind of strange for me. I have my main domain let's say: www.domain.com. Then I have my mobile version in a subdomain: mobile.domain.com and I also have a german version of the website de.domain.com. When I Google my domain I have the main result linking to: www.domain.com but then Google mixes all the domains in the sites links. For example a Sing in may be linking mobile.domain.com, a How it works link may be pointing to de.domain.com, etc What's the solution? I think this is hurting a lot my position cause google sees that all are the same domain when clearly is not. thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabrizzio0 -
How can I export SEOmoz ranking reports to google spreadsheet
How can I export SEOmoz website rankings to Google Spreadsheet? I have applied other SEOmoz API's and Google Spreadsheet combos effectively but cannot find anything online for this. I would like to display current ranking and ranking history for specific keywords in Google Spreadsheet and have them update automatically using the SEOmoz API.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael_Rock0