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.
Are In-Page Tabs still detrimental to SEO?
-
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?qt-staff_profile_tabs=1
-
They haven't performed well for us and based on customer feedback we have gone away from using them if possible.
-
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.
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
-
Local SEO - ranking the same page for multiple locations
Hi everyone, I am aware that issue of local SEO has been approached numerous times, but the situation that I'm dealing with is slightly different, so I'd love to receive your expert advice. I'm running the website of a property management company which services multiple locations (www.homevault.com). From our local offices in the city center, we also service neighboring towns and communities ( ex: we have an office in Charlotte NC, from which we service Charlotte plus a dozen other towns nearby). We wanted to avoid creating dozens of extra local service pages, particularly since our offers are identical per metropolitan area and we're talking of 20-30 additional local pages for each area. Instead, we decided to create local service pages only for the main locations. Needless to say, we're now ranking for the main locations, but we're missing on all searches for property management in neighboring towns (we're doing good on searches such as 'charlotte property management', but we're practically invisible for 'davidson property management', although we're searvicing that area as well). What we've done so far to try and fix the situation: 1. The current location pages do include descriptions of areas that we serve. 2. We've included 1-2 keywords for the sattelite locations in the main location pages, but we're nowhere near the optimization needed to rank for local searches in neighboring towns (ie, some main local service pages rank on pages 2-4 for sattelite towns, so not good enough). 3. We've included the searviced areas in our local GMBs, directories, social media profiles etc. None of these solutions appear to work great. Should I go ahead and create the classic local pages for each and every town and optimize them on those particular keywords, even if the offer is practically the same, and the number of pages risks going out of control? Any other better ideas? Many thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HomeVaultPM0 -
404 Errors flaring on nonexistent or unpublished pages – should we be concerned for SEO?
Hello! We keep getting "critical crawler" notifications on Moz because of firing 404 codes. We've checked each page and know that we are not linking to them anywhere on our site, they are not published and they are not indexed on Google. It's only happened since we migrated our blog to Hubspot so we think it has something to do with the test pages their developers had set up and that they are just lingering in our code somewhere. However, we are still concerned having these codes fire implies negative consequences for our SEO. Is this the case? Should we be concerned about these 404 codes despite the pages from those URLs not actually existing? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DebFF
Chloe0 -
Home Page Disappears From Google - But Rest of Site Still Ranked
As title suggests we are running into a serious issue of the home page disapearing from Google search results whilst the rest of the site still remains. We search for it naturally cannot find a trace, then use a "site:" command in Google and still the home page does not come up. We go into web masters and inspect the home page and even Google states that the page is indexable. We then run the "Request Indexing" and the site comes back on Google. This is having a damaging affect and we would like to understand why this issue is happening. Please note this is not happening on just one of our sites but has happened to three which are all located on the same server. One of our brand which has the issue is: www.henweekends.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
Lightboxes and SEO
Do lightboxes (AKA popup boxes when you click "learn more" type CTAs) have any negative effect on SEO? We are looking at revamping our sites to have more of a tiled approach, and a lightbox with summary content popping out with additional CTAs, directing to pages with more information or free trial pages. Is there any downside to this approach from an organic perspective? is there anything specific to keep in mind when creating these if not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
Can noindexed pages accrue page authority?
My company's site has a large set of pages (tens of thousands) that have very thin or no content. They typically target a single low-competition keyword (and typically rank very well), but the pages have a very high bounce rate and are definitely hurting our domain's overall rankings via Panda (quality ranking). I'm planning on recommending we noindexed these pages temporarily, and reindex each page as resources are able to fill in content. My question is whether an individual page will be able to accrue any page authority for that target term while noindexed. We DO want to rank for all those terms, just not until we have the content to back it up. However, we're in a pretty competitive space up against domains that have been around a lot longer and have higher domain authorities. Like I said, these pages rank well right now, even with thin content. The worry is if we noindex them while we slowly build out content, will our competitors get the edge on those terms (with their subpar but continually available content)? Do you think Google will give us any credit for having had the page all along, just not always indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | THandorf0 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
Onsite SEO vs Offsite SEO
Hey I know the importance of both onsite & offsite, primarily with regard to outreach/content/social. One thing I am trying to determine at the moment, is how much do I invest in offsite. My current focus is to improve our onpage content on product pages, which is taking some time as we have a small team. But I also know our backlinks need to improve. I'm just struggling on where to spend my time. Finish the onsite stuff by section first, or try to do a bit of both onsite/offsite at the same time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0