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
-
My site on desktop browser: page 2 /mobile browser: page 0
Using my two most pertinent keywords in Chome my site shows up page two. Using the same keywords on my iPhone does not show my site at all (I clicked on to page 15). I have a mobile ranking of 84 on Google PageSpeed Insights. Could be a bit higher but not enough to totally ignore my site. What am I missing?
On-Page Optimization | | artsp0 -
Product Page Links
I have a product category page at https://www.hurtlegear.com.au/s1000rr/ which currently has 38 products on it. Problem is, all the product titles start with the name of the text: "bmw s1000rr" (because that's what they are) - so that means there are 38 anchored internal links on that page, all starting with the same keyword. You can see how that might look to the Google crawler. Recently that page dropped from around 15 to outside the top 100, and Moz tells me that the page is keyword stuffed with "bmw s1000rr" (no suprise) so I'm guessing that may be the reason the page has disappeared out of the SERPs. I don't really want to change all the product titles (then they wouldn't make sense) so I'm just wondering if there is any way around this? Is there some way of telling Google that this is a product category page and therefore to ignore the anchor text in all of those product links? Can/should the links have some kind of markup on them? Or is the page beyond help? Basically I'm looking at a way of keeping the product titles as they are, but avoiding a page penalty from Google somehow. I'm a bit of a newbie, any suggestions would be most appreciated. Cheers, Graeme
On-Page Optimization | | graeme720 -
Reducing multi-page website to one page & SEO ramifications?
Hello there! I just want to check in before I do this. I am reducing a multi-page website to one page (temporarily, but for at least 4-6 months). I will be 301 redirecting all old pages to the one, new home page. The new home page has a lot more content, long and short keyword phrases. Aside from losing the benefit of internal links, will reducing the number of website pages hurt a ranking? Does having associated keywords on other website pages provide benefit to another (in this case Home) page? Thanks so much for your invaluable advice!
On-Page Optimization | | lulu710 -
What's the best SEO tactics when you have a dedicated web address pointing to a page on a different site?
Hope someone can help with a question I've got about sorting out some duplicate content issues. To simplify the question, imagine there is a website a.com which has a page a.com/newslettersignup. In addition to the a.com domain, there is also a different web address, ashortcut.com, which points to a.com/newslettersignup. ashortcut.com is the web address that is advertised in marketing material etc. So what is the best way then to tell Google etc. that ashortcut.com is the preferred URL for the page which sits at a.com/newslettersignup? The advice I've read about the canonical tag, for example, doesn't cover this exact scenario so although it can support cross-domain information, I'm not sure if that's the best route to follow. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Nobody15755058948220 -
Wrong Page is Ranking
My client is an Ecommerce reseller of a few major scooter brands. We currently rank fifth for a particular brand name but our main brand page isn't the one that ranks. Instead, it's a product page. The main brand page has an A rating from Moz for the desired keyword phrases. Neither page has any backlinks. Any ideas on why our main brand page would be outranked by a product page? What could we do to change this?
On-Page Optimization | | TrinShin0 -
Anyone done SEO with on-page ONLY?
I read this blog post: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/let-onpage-optimization-change-your-life The author claims they have increased the visitors 50 fold doing on-page seo ONLY. So they just added content, and optimized the site structure. Anyone have seen similar results? Not outreach whatsoever, just adding content to site. Technically, this should be true, article directories has tons of visitors and they were giving out links.
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseseo0 -
On Page SEO Tool
Hello - I'm looking for one tool that does the following and was wondering if anyone knew of such a tool? In a perfect world I would like to enter in one domain name and have a report generated that shows All Internal links, link titles, and anchor text All internal broken links / redirects All images, image size and image alt, if the image alt is missing. I'd love to be about to export these reports to excel and quickly run my on page optimization. The goal is to produce a checklist for a developer to execute quickly. Thanks for your help Gabe
On-Page Optimization | | Gabe0 -
Improve Site SEO
Hey Guys I was wondering if you could give me advice to improving my SEO. I have used all the tools on this site and have improved it a lot already, but wondering if there is any glaring issues, that I could fix now www.treelifedesigns.com
On-Page Optimization | | treelifedesigns0