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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.
Ranking penalty for "accordion" content -- hidden prior to user interaction
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Will content inside an "accordion" module be ranked as non-hidden content?
Is there an official guide by google and other search engines addressing this?
Example of accordion element: https://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/components/collapse/#accordion-example
Will all elements in the example above be seen + treated equally by search engines?
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Although I have no active accordions at the moment, I do have bootstrap tabs and all of the hidden content within the tabs is crawled. To test your own page, go to webmaster tools and Fetch as Google. When fetching is done, click on the page link and select the tab "Fetching". This shows all of the HTML crawled and you can verify that the content in the accordion has been crawled. You also mentioned "penalty". Google's policy on penalties for hidden content is here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66353?hl=en. Google would not consider tabs and accordions containing legitimate content (no white text etc.) to fall under this "Hidden text and links" category.
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Content inside an "accordion" module can be seen by Google for example if read more button is clicked to display more text. This is not hidden content and do not have to worry.
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