Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How search engines look at collapse content in mobile while on desktop it open by default?
-
Hello everyone!
To have a mobile friendly UX we chose to collapse some of the page content.
On the desktop it is in open mode by default and user can see the whole content.
Does the search engines see the content even if it's collapse? is the collapse mode on the mobile only can hurt us with SERP ranking? -
Thanks Bridget. I think the question eventually is this:
If there is a mobile page with hidden content (e.g., collapsed) - and assuming it's hidden in a way that is viewable to Google crawler - does that content get lower importance in ranking even though it is not hidden in desktop?
Example:
- Desktop version of the page has "Keyword1" visibly displayed.
- Mobile version of same page has "Keyword1" hidden in a collapsed view.
Will the mobile version be better ranked for "Keyword1" if it will not be hidden? Even though it's not hidden in the desktop version?
If it's hidden in both versions then my assumption is that the answer is yes based on this statement from Google's John Mueller (November 2014):
"From our point of view, it's always a tricky problem when we send a user to a page where we know this content is actually hidden. Because the user will see perhaps the content in the snippet, they'll click through the page, and say, well, I don't see where this information is on this page. I feel kind of almost misled to click on this to actually get in there." https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hidden-tab-content-seo-19489.htmlBut I'm not sure if that's still true when it's hidden only for mobile.
Appreciate everyone's thoughts on this.
-
I have to disagree with the above.
Google absolutely can view mobile content, in fact they have a separate crawler that spoofs a mobile user agent in order to crawl mobile content. They may not have a separate mobile index of that content, but that has nothing to do with whether they view, crawl, and index mobile pages. We know that they do, in fact, given that whether a page is mobile-friendly is a rankings factor for mobile search results.
To answer your question - having the content collapsed shouldn't be a problem as long as the content is viewable with Javascript and CSS disabled. If Javascript is required to expand the collapsed content, the mobile crawler may not be able to see this content. You may want to test the page(s) with the Mobile-friendly Testing Tool and also try a Fetch and Render (for Smartphone) of the mobile page, to see how Google sees the page(s).
-
This is spot-on correct.
-
Currently, Google only looks at the desktop version of the page for it's index so collapsing for mobile would have no effect on rankings.
In general, Google says that hidden/collapsible content is given less weight than visible since its not considered as important for users to see.
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
-
How to get local search volumes?
Hi Guys, I want to get search volumes for "carpet cleaning" for certain areas in Sydney, Australia. I'm using this process: Choose to ‘Search for new keyword and ad group ideas’. Enter the main keywords regarding your product / service Remove any default country targeting Specify your chosen location (s) by targeting specific cities / regions Click to ‘Get ideas’ The problem is none of the areas, even popular ones (like north sydney, surry hills, newtown, manly) are appearing and Google keyword tool, no matches. Is there any other tools or sources of data i can use to get accurate search volumes for these areas? Any recommendations would be very much appreciated. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak650 -
Same content, different languages. Duplicate content issue? | international SEO
Hi, If the "content" is the same, but is written in different languages, will Google see the articles as duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chalet
If google won't see it as duplicate content. What is the profit of implementing the alternate lang tag?Kind regards,Jeroen0 -
Category Pages & Content
Hi Does anyone have any great examples of an ecommerce site which has great content on category pages or product listing pages? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
What's the best possible URL structure for a local search engine?
Hi Mozzers, I'm working at AskMe.com which is a local search engine in India i.e if you're standing somewhere & looking for the pizza joints nearby, we pick your current location and share the list of pizza outlets nearby along with ratings, reviews etc. about these outlets. Right now, our URL structure looks like www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets for the city specific category pages (here, "Delhi" is the city name and "Pizza Outlets" is the category) and www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets/in/saket for a category page in a particular area (here "Saket") in a city. The URL looks a little different if you're searching for something which is not a category (or not mapped to a category, in which case we 301 redirect you to the category page), it looks like www.askme.com/delhi/search/pizza-huts/in/saket if you're searching for pizza huts in Saket, Delhi as "pizza huts" is neither a category nor its mapped to any category. We're also dealing in ads & deals along with our very own e-commerce brand AskMeBazaar.com to make the better user experience and one stop shop for our customers. Now, we're working on URL restructure project and my question to you all SEO rockstars is, what can be the best possible URL structure we can have? Assume, we have kick-ass developers who can manage any given URL structure at backend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _nitman0 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
No-index pages with duplicate content?
Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Reducing Booking Engine Indexation
Hi Mozzers, I am working on a site with a very useful room booking engine. Helpful as it may be, all the variations (2 bedrooms, 3 bedrooms, room with a view, etc, etc,) are indexed by Google. Section 13 on Search Pagination in Dr. Pete's great post on Panda http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world speaks to our issue, but I was wondering since 2 (!) years have gone by, if there are any additional solutions y'all might recommend. We want to cut down on the duplicate titles and content and get the useful but not useful for SERPs online booking pages out of the index. Any thoughts? Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Leverage_Marketing0 -
Soft Hyphenation: Influence on Search Engines
Does anyone have experience on soft hyphenation and its effects on rankings? We are planning to use in our company blog to improve the layout. Currently, every word above 4 syllable will be soft hyphenated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zeepartner
This seems to render okay in all browsers, but it might be a problem with IE9... In HTML 5, the "" soft hyphenation seems to be replaced with the <wbr> Tag (http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_wbr.asp) and i don't find anything else about soft-hyphenation in the specs. Any experiences or opinions about this? Do you think it affects rankings if there are a lot of soft hyphens in the text? Does it still make sense to use or would you switch to <wbr> already?0