Are In-Page Tabs still detrimental to SEO?

[yaelslater]

Hi Mozers,

Are in-page tabs still detrimental for SEO?

In-page tabs: allow you to  alternate between views within the same context, not to navigate to different areas.  As in one long HTML page that just looks like it's divided into different pages via tabs that you can click between.

Each tab has it's own URL, which I guess is for analytics tracking purposes?

https://XXX

https://XXX?qt-staff_profile_tabs=1

https://XXX?qt-staff_profile_tabs=2

https://XXX?qt-staff_profile_tabs=3

[NickNieto]

They haven't performed well for us and based on customer feedback we have gone away from using them if possible.

[EGOL]

This isn't an answer to your question.  It is just an old man's way of looking at tabbed content and other things that Google treats differently today than they treated it in the past....

When search engines treat something like tabbed content poorly, and then they treat it a little better, you never know if their current treatment is the same as it would  be if tabs were not used at all.

Also, if they treated something poorly in the past, you will never know if or when they will they will start treating it poorly in the future... even if they might degrade it by degrees.

Google does some stuff for good reason, some stuff because they have a mad hat on that day, and some stuff because they think it is cool that day.   All of that can change instantly and without notice if they wear a different hat or think something else is cooler, or if a different guy is put in charge.

The above is part of the reason that Google says that they make changes to their ranking methods every day.

I used to have a couple pages in tabbed content, they performed very poorly - even after a long wait.  So, now I am not using tabbed content.     And, honestly, when I took that content out of tabs my visitors engaged it more vigorously.   Two reasons not to use tabbed content in my book.