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.
Accordion Fold Ups Bad For Google
-
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!
-
Great responses, everyone. Thanks! What did you decided to do, OOMDO?
-
Interesting. Thanks for sharing that.
-
I was originally using on-page anchor links like this...
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?
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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?
-
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.
-
A good rule of thumb is if you can see all the "hidden" content if Javascript is turned off you are basically safe.
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 is Single Page Application (SPA) bad for SEO
Hi guys. I am quite inspired of SPA technique. It's really amazing when all your interaction with the site is going on the fly and you don't see any page reloads. I've started implementing the site with this instruction and already found nice guys to make the design. The only downside of the using SPA which I can see **is the **SEO part. That's because the URL does not really change and different pages don't have their unique URL addresses.
Web Design | | Billy_gym
Actually they have, but it looks like: yoursite.com/#/products yoursite.com/#/prices yoursite.com/#/contact So all of them goes after # and being just anchors. For Google this mean all of these pages is just yoursite.com/ My question is what is really proven method to implement the URL structure in Single Page Application, so all the pages indexed by Google correctly (sorry I don't mention the other search engines because of market share). The other question, of course, is examples. It will be great to see real life site examples, better authority sites, which use SPA technique and well indexed by search engines.1 -
Side bar menu, good or bad idea.
Hi everyone, I have a little problem. Not that long ago I launched my new site. Everything seems ok, but I'm not sure if it was clever idea to have additional side bar menu option. I wanted relevant content to be accessible very easy without dropdown in main menu. It looks ok on desktop, but we have a problem with mobile devices. Even main menu is a bit confusing and sidebar at the moment is at the bottom of each page. When I placed it on top of the page, we had problem with tablet users as it is showing side menu with blank page and content is almost below the fold. I have a tool installed called usability tools and it shows how visitors are using my site. The hard bit is that nobody on mobile devices are using sidebar and that means people visit one page and leave without exploring any additional resources. Me and my developer are discussing that maybe we should have two main menu bars instead of sidebar, but I have no idea how this looks in real life. What is the best practises for sidebar menus these days? Maybe we have a designer here who can help me with this and do some work? My site is https://a-fotografy.co.uk/ Thank you for all help in input in advance. Regards, Armands
Web Design | | A_Fotografy0 -
Decreasing Page Load Time with Placeholder Images - Good Idea or Bad Idea?
In an effort to decease our page load time, we are looking at making a change so that all product images on any page past page 1 load with a place holder image. When the user clicks to the next page, it then loads all of the images for that page. Right now, all of the product divs are loaded into a Javascript array and loaded in chunks to the page display div. Product-heavy pages significantly increase load time as the browser loads all of the images from the product HTML before the Javascript can rewrite the display div with page-specific product HTML. In order to get around this, we are looking at loading the product HTML with a small placeholder image and then substituting the appropriate product image URLs when each page is output to the display div. From a user experience, this change will be seamless and they won't be able to tell the difference, plus they will benefit from a potentially a short wait on loading the images for the page in question. However, the source of the page will have all of the product images in a given category page all having the same image. How much of a negative impact will this have on SEO?
Web Design | | airnwater0 -
Google also indexed trailing slash version - PLEASE HELP
Hi Guys, We redesigned the website and somehow our canonical extension decided to add a trailing slash to all URLs. Previously our canonical URLs didn't have a trailing slash. During the redesign we haven't changed the URLs. They remained same but we have now two versions indexed. One with trailing slash one without. I've now fixed the issue and removed the the trailing slash from canonical URLs. Is this the correct way of fixing it? Will our rankings be effected in a negative way? Is there anything else I need to do. The website went live last Tuesday. Thanks
Web Design | | Jvalops0 -
URLs with Hashtags - Does Google Index Them?
Hi there, I have a potential issue with a site whereby all pages are dynamically populated using Javascript. Thus, an example of an URL on their site would be www.example.com/#!/category/product. I have read lots of conflicting information on the web - some says Google will ignore everything after the hashtag; other people say that Google will now index everything after the hashtag. Does anybody have any conclusive information about this? Any links to Google or Matt Cutts as confirmation would be brilliant. P.S. I am aware about the potential issue of duplicate content, but I can assure you that has been dealt with. I am only concerned about whether Google will index full URLs that contain hashtags. Thanks all! Mark
Web Design | | markadoi840 -
Google penalty for links opening in new tab?
Our web services provided suggested that Google doesn't like in-text links that open the link in a new tab. Can anyone verify this? We often link to outside credible resources for our audience, though it seems smarter to open in a new tab rather than risk that the person will not navigate back to our site after finding us. Thank you in advance!
Web Design | | jhamlin0 -
Should I use the google mod_pagespeed in my apache server?
Anyone already use it? There is some speed benefit? http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/module.html
Web Design | | Naghirniac0 -
How to make Address Text Clickable for Google Map Link for Mobile Device
How do I make the address text on the site a clickable link for mobile devices?
Web Design | | bozzie3110