How does a collapsed section affect on page SEO?
-
A client recently asked me whether a tabbed collapsed section of text that is expanded (i.e. revealed) when clicked, is an OK thing to do without negatively effecting SEO.
I told him that for starters, he may want to rethink why he would want to hide the text in the first place (this is not an FAQ type scenario). The reason has to do with the aesthetic of the page.
Anyway, aesthetic aside, any thoughts on whether a collapsed (hidden from view) negatively affects on-page SEO?
Thanks.
Stephan -
As long as the search engine can read all the text, I see no issues. Modern designers put text in multiple tabs or partially hidden until expanded all the time these to create a better user experience. It is generally only hidden from the user using css and is fully visible in the code.
-
Hi Stephan,
Presuming the expand/collapse thing is done properly, it should be golden. You'll find a lot of sites use this approach when they have multiple pages of content, e.g. a product page with specifications, reviews, technical details, etc.
I do this on my travel website. A great way to test to see if the initially-collapsed content is being seen and indexed by Google is to take a block of text from the collapsed section and search for it in double-quotes.
Here's an example: search for "At the Bora Bora Pearl Beach Resort you can discover the sparkling magic of the lagoon". You'll find my site there at #3 (Visual Itineraries), along with the other 1000 websites who've also copied the resort's description straight from the resort's website (yeah, I really shouldn't do this). So much for Google's duplicate content detection when it comes to text chunks...BUT I DIGRESS. That content you see is on the More Info tab.
Now, on to what "done properly" means:
- each tab should be in a separate div
- assign all divs a class which has style="display:none;" EXCEPT the currently selected tab
- have onclick handlers for the tabs that set all of the divs' classes to the display:none class, and then set the newly selected tab's div class to one with display:block or display:inline
And not done properly would mean something like changing the text of a div with Javascript onclick()....because Google won't see that text in the Javascript. It's got to be in the HTML.
That's about it. Not so tricky, really. And works well both for usability (no roundtrip to the server, not even an Ajax fetch!) and for SEO (lotsa yummy content on a single page for Panda).
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
-
Too many on-page links
Hi, I've apparently got too many on-page links on 79 of my webpages. The majority of these pages are category pages, like this: https://www.turnkeymortgages.co.uk/mortgage-advice/mortgages/... so, what's a person to do? Obviously the page would be useless without the links. Should I just ignore these 'errors'? Or is there something else I should do? I don't want to appear manipulative by labelling them nofollow... Thanks, Amelia
On-Page Optimization | | CommT0 -
To create extra pages, or not to create extra pages?
I'm responsible for a site where we cater for all kinds of medical & legal problems. I recently conducted keyword research that shows a lot of questions being 'asked' in relation to the conditions we cater for. Naturally, I want to create content to answer these questions. We have a page for 'Cancer compensation' - the 'possible content' that answers questions won't necessarily help someone claiming compensation for cancer mistreatment, BUT someone who asks a question relating to cancer, answered in the 'possible content' may find the 'cancer compensation' page useful. SO! Do I: Add this content to the existing 'cancer compensation' page? Create individual pages of content answering each question, linking to the 'cancer compensation' page? or do I amalgamate all the answers into one heafty 'resource' page that sits elsewhere on the site? What do you think? Thanks in advance. John King
On-Page Optimization | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Re-naming pages without affecting SEO
Due to the management software used for a lot of our websites, the URLs for specific pages appears as: brand.com/page/pagename/number I want to add slug URLs so that they appear as: brand.com/pagename First of all, do you think this is an effective use of my time and will it significantly benefit SEO in the long run. Secondly, these pages have developed a decent PA over time and I don't want to lose that. Will adding 301s for all the renamed pages be enough to not have a negative effect?
On-Page Optimization | | maxweb1 -
How to "on page" seo a small local service business - particularly headers
First off, let me apologize if this question is posted elsewhere, worded differently. I've looked around quite a bit and have been unable to find the answer. Basically, we are a small web design firm just getting our feet with with SEO. Most of our clients, especially initially, will be quite small, local, service businesses. For example: and electrician, a pet sitter, a retail printing and map store, a surgeon etc. Almost all of their sites will follow a basic "business card on the web" format... Home Page - About Us - Testimonials - Rates - FAQ - Contact Us - Etc So, from what I've read about on-page optimization, making sure my keywords are in the title, header, body, and meta description is one of the easiest and quickest things we can do for our clients. This is a straightforward concept for me when applied to the homepage. For example, take the local pet sitting business. Her keywords are: Pet sitting, Dog walking, and the city we live in, Anytown USA. So, I've used those keywords in all the appropriate places on the home page: title: Dog Walking and Pet Sitting Service in Anytown USA header: Dog Walking and Pet Sitting Service in Anytown USA first sentence of body: We are a professional Dog Walking and Pet Sitting Service in Anytown USA meta description: We are a professional Dog Walking and Pet Sitting Service in Anytown USA. At Business Name your furry friends become a part of our family. So, my question is: Do I also optimize the "about us" page? I've changed the title of all the pages to follow this format: Dog Walking and Pet Sitting in Anytown USA - Home Dog Walking and Pet Sitting in Anytown USA - About Us Dog Walking and Pet Sitting in Anytown USA - Rates Dog Walking and Pet Sitting in Anytown USA - FAQ Dog Walking and Pet Sitting in Anytown USA - Etc Easy enough so far. Also pretty easy for the meta description, and the body. However, how would I add keywords to the header without making it look ridiculous? We use wordpress with the genesis framework, and child themes from studiopress. The header is always prominently visible at the top of the page. Most people would expect to see the header be the same as the link they clicked on the nav bar: for example, on the "about us" page, people expect the header to be: "about us" Not: "dog walking and pet sitting in Anytown USA - About Us" Do I just not worry about the headers on the other pages? For that matter, I'd really like people to "land" on the home page, not any of the other pages, so should I not optimize them at all? Does optimizing the rest of the pages help the home page to show up higher in the SERPS? If I do end up optimizing the rest of the pages, should I use slightly different spellings of the keywords: like Dog walker instead of dog walking? Or pet sitter instead of pet sitting? I've repeatedly seen people talk about not using the same keywords on more than one page... but for most of these businesses there are really fairly few keywords. There just isn't that many different ways that someone is going to search for an electrician, or a plumber, or a pet sitter. By the second or third page that I optimize on one site, I imagine I'll start running out of different variations of the keywords. I recognize that a lot of what we'll do that will be most helpful to local clients has nothing to do with on page optimization (setting up google places, google+, yahoo + bing local, etc). I'd just like to make sure that I'm doing the on page stuff as perfectly as possible. Thanks for your time and responses! -Matt p.s. while I'm at it, let me ask another question about domain names as well. Right now the pet sitting client mentioned above is using: www.petcare_Anytown_.com After operating her business for the last year she realized she is much more interested in dog walking than pet sitting. We are in the processes of redesigning the site, and when finished, are considering moving it to: www.dogwalking_Anytown_.com My assumption is that as long as we use permanent redirects from the old site to the new one, we shouldn't lose much SEO value. Is this thinking correct? On a related note though: another article I read mentioned that using a brand name in the domain may actually be more useful than the keyword rich domains above. However, www._businessname._com happens to already be taken by a pet sitting business at the other end of the country. We could however use: www.businessnameAnytown.com Which one do you think would work better? The keyword/location domain, or the businessname/location domain? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Webformix0 -
Page Title
My website was hacked last November and then again last week. Prior to the hacking we were at number one in Google.co.uk for our main search term "nile cruises' for years. After last November's hacking we dropped to about position 4 and after last week we are at position 7. Ima rebuilding the lost data and I am having to create new Title and Description meta data for each of the indexed pages. I am taking the opportunity to try and ensure my titles and descriptions are good and the correct length, etc but wondered about the best title format. I set our home page title over the weekend as: Nile Cruise | Leading ABTA & ATOL Bonded UK Nile Cruise Specialist I was going to try and cover 3 keyphrases in the title like this: Nile Cruise | Nile Cruises | Nile Cruise Bargains But I thought that might look a bit spammy because the 3 phrases are very similar. I wondered what anyone else might suggest? Thanks, Colin
On-Page Optimization | | NileCruises0 -
An ecomerce seo question
Looking for a few opinions on this please...Trying to reduce the number of pages I have to seo to rank on my websites and at the same time avoid the google over optimisation issues. Previously on our ecomerce websites we would have a category page for, say, 12 times, we would then seo that page for generic terms related to the page; ie, blue dress, cheap blue dress, blue party dress etc. The individual product pages would then be seoed with the title and h1 tags containing the exact product name and the url containing the product name too. This worked fine but we are suffering from some duplicate content issues of late (the products are mixture of few unique items and probably 95% imported affiliate datafeeds) as we have an average of 80,000 products per store we have neither the time nor the staff to rewrite everything (the products update daily directly from the merchants so would need to be done daily) What we are planning on moving toward is blocking the individual product pages from Google and instead putting all efforts into the category pages. The category page will contain plenty of quality unique content related to the category so the only duplicate content would be a line of the product name and price. Whilst we would still rank the category page for broad keywords we also would like to now rank the category page for 16 individual product names as there is a good profit to make made by the sheer volume of product names we plan on ranking for. Obviously we could not get all the products into the url and the page title as that would be silly but would it be acceptable to have multiple h2 tags on the page, each with a different entry, the product names (H1 will be saved for the category name). We can easily bold these keywords to help in the optimisation as per the seo moz onsite analysis tool and we can add image text to ensure the product name is featured at least twice on the page. As so few sites actually seo for the long tail product names, most retailers rank by virtue of their domain quality alone, our onsite seo doesn't have to be 100% but getting the best we can out of the page will help the efforts. Many thanks Carl
On-Page Optimization | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
On-page: Over optimized images?
Hello guys. I have a small question about an on-page optimization for images. What I have: good title tag / good url structure good content (NOT keyword shuffled, its real content, for real people) images / gallery uploaded to folder named same as article name. For example: Great tips for bloggers [article name], great-tips-for-bloggers [folder name]. So my question is: Will Google harm me for this "too good" paths to images, article related image filenames, with mask like [gtips-img01], and if all images have titles / alt tags? Thank you guys.
On-Page Optimization | | infoo130 -
Best Layout for Product Page SEO
Hi I am looking to revamp my website and would like to know your views on the best product layout for SEO - in particular if it better to have tabulated content like play.com http://goo.gl/4xdqp or non tabulated content like Amazon. http://goo.gl/cojKj Are there any pros or cons to each approach? I believe tabulated looks better and is easier to navigate but do the engines see this as hidden text? I have been told this is an issue with expandable divs. Many thanks David
On-Page Optimization | | DavidLenehan0