Google and Product Description Tabs

[AWCthreads]

How does Google process a product page with description tabs?  For example, lets say the product page has a tab for Overview, Specifications, What's In the Box and so on.

Wouldn't that content be better served in one main product description tab with the tab names used as (htags) or highlighted paragraph separators?

Or, does all that content get crawled as a single page regardless of the tabs?

[ReferralCandy]

Just to add on to Mike's response, it depends on how the description tabs are created. If each tab is created on a different page, then naturally Google will treat it as separate pages. However, if all the tabs are created on the same page, but CSS/AJAX is used to display each tab separately, then Google will still consider all the tabs to come from the same page.

Besides Googling, you can also check the page source code. If the content in all the tabs appear in the source code, they will all be crawled as a single page.

[MikeRoberts]

It may depend on how the tabs are set up. If you can see it in the page source without any problem then usually Google can too. Quick test to check: Grab a chunk of content, copy/paste it into Google search with quotes around it and see if your page comes up. If it did... then yes, Google read it perfectly fine. If not then you need to check how your tabs are hiding the content and fix it.

Two of the ecommerce sites I work on handle content on product pages using tabs to separate specifications, description, accessories and so on. Google can see all of our stuff perfectly fine as one page.

[JMacSupply]

From my experience , the content would be better served in one main product description tab - as you thought it may.

Hope that helps