Can Google read content that is hidden under a "Read More" area?

[jlo7613]

For example, when a person first lands on a given page, they see a collapsed paragraph but if they want to gather more information they press the "read more" and it expands to reveal the full paragraph. Does Google crawl the full paragraph or just the shortened version?

In the same vein, what if you have a text box that contains three different tabs. For example, you're selling a product that has a text box with overview, instructions & ingredients tabs all housed under the same URL. Does Google crawl all three tabs?

Thanks for your insight!

[KevinBudzynski]

Yes, for the most part. Google wants to deliver the best results for visitors based on their search query. So if something is hidden from initial view this would impact ux and especially if it's poorly implemented (not intuitive). As you know, original and compelling copy is the best. Unfortunately in many situations, such as a large ecommerce site, it is resource intensive. It's best to avoid thin content. However, it does get ranked as you can grab a snippet and place in Google and look at the results. So yes, it's possible that Google will rank these pages with duplicate content in a hidden view.

I would advise you to tell your client to remove any hidden content and rewrite product descriptions. Depending on resources, they may/may not want to do this. If they don't, at least you made a recommendation. Good luck!

[jlo7613]

Ok, that makes sense. And can that be applied to a text box with tabs?

Follow up to that - the situation is that I have a client hat doesn't have a lot of "original" content on their e-commerce page. It sounds like Google will take into account that content as "original" content but won't necessarily used it to build relevancy for any keywords hidden within.  Is that correct?

[Vijay-Gaur]

I agree with Kevin in the answer above, the content may be crawled (depending on how you have hidden the paragraph using HTML) but Google may not give the right advantage of the content available after clicking the link.

We have a client with FAQ section with similar situation https://www.fairsplit.com/faqs/  , the website gets authority for the Question Titles of the FAQ section and not for the content as answer available after clicking the question.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have further questions.

Regards,

Vijay

[KevinBudzynski]

The Googlebot will crawl this information. However, Google may elect not to index it or discount this content in its rankings.