Text in collapsed section

[MickEdwards]

Does anyone have any quantifiable evidence regarding text that is collapsed - when clicked the section expands and presents the text, against just having the text on view in the page.

That is, instead of having a FAQ with question followed by answer, there is a question which you click to expose/expand the answer.

Could the collapsed text be potentially detrimental to ranking?

[MickEdwards]

Possibly.  This is on DNN which seems to be like a big old clunky dinosaur.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Michael,

Ah - that's different yes. You would want to be doing this with CSS, with the collapsed content available in HTML. Google and other search engines don't regularly execute js so would likely not see the content. Manual investigation would let a webspam team member see that you're not hiding anything maliciously, but it's not a risk you want to take.

Can you do this with CSS?

Cheers.

[MickEdwards]

What i'm not happy about is that the module running on javascript loses all content if javascript is not enabled in the browser.  I was under the impression it is not a good idea to work like that and if js not running all text should be visible.  Is that right?

[JaneCopland]

Hi Michael,

I am not sure what you are looking for in terms of evidence, but this is a widely accepted and often implemented tactic for web design purposes, and this will not get you into trouble unless a) you are "hiding" huge amounts of text (many, many times bigger than the page itself), or b) if the text has nothing to do with the content of the page that is available on page load. An FAQ with expandable answers should always be fine, but consider providing the first sentences of the answer on page load if possible.