Google not crawling click to expand content - suggestions?
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It seems like Google confirmed this week in a G+ hangout that content in click to expand content e.g. 'read more' dropdown and tabbed content scenarios will be discounted. The suggestion was if you have content it needs to be visible on page load. Here's more on it https://www.seroundtable.com/google-index-click-to-expand-19449.html and the actual hangout, circa 11 mins in https://plus.google.com/events/cjcubhctfdmckph433d00cro9as.
From a UX and usability point of view having a lot of content that was otherwise tabbed or in click to expand divs can be terrible, especially on mobile.
Does anyone have workable solutions or can think of examples of really great landing pages (i'm mostly thinking ecommerce) that also has a lot of visible content?
Thanks
Andy
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I can only think of 2 real alternatives that would do you any good:
- Create separate pages that show only the content in your click-to-expand sections (being sure to add canonical tags where appropriate) and have those pages linked to from the footer, a sitemap, or whatever section you see fit.
- Place the content from the click-to-expand sections in alt-text for whatever buttons / images / etc. that you're using to guide users to the content. This should, in theory, still be crawled, and would act as any other alt-text does; meaning that it would allow those who can't view your content to still see a text version of it.
While it's odd that Google would denounce click-to-expand content, they've always had a weird distaste for javascript and other useful codes on occasion. Whatever you do, I think it's always important to place the value of UX over SEO. But that's just my insight.
Good luck!
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