Comments on: Google Ignores Hidden Content – Including Tabs?

By: Lyndon NA

Lyndon NA — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 14:46:00 +0000

Funny – as Google put in foldout/expanding sections in their help docsa few years ago – and a couple of the TCs pointed out it was a bad UX as you couldn’t see/find what you thought would be there. I’ve seen bad implementations else where as well.

But those aren’t the same as “tabbed” – and most people I’ve monitored have understood the concept of tabs well enough.

I’ve yet to see content that G didn’t index … nor return when a specific string is searched for (quoted).

So the question is, are G applying a SERP Filter for relevancy to content that is not “immediately visible”?

By: Lyndon NA

Lyndon NA — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 14:44:00 +0000

Not sure how it stands with some assistive devices today – but the old advice was to avoid using visibility:hidden as it may result in the content being ignored. The best approaches were stacking (position:absolute and z-index) or negative placement (-9999px).

By: Sergei Prakapovich

Sergei Prakapovich — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 08:41:00 +0000

Google still indexing the hidden content and hidden links. Maybe this sites receive some ranking penalties, but hacked sites still have a lot of hidden links that passing the linksjuice.

By: David Iwanow

David Iwanow — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 06:50:00 +0000

I do think the idea is scary for many UX types as that’s the best way to balance the content heavy requests of SEO with the fact that the page has a lot of information to convey to the user but still actually convert. I had dreaded that Google might devalue this technique but it seems you are screwed if content is below the fold or neatly placed within a tabbed structure. There are more than a few websites that might be stuck with a catch-22 on what is “now google best practice” vs “conversion optimisation”

By: Alistair Lattimore

Alistair Lattimore — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:49:00 +0000

I wonder if how the content is being hidden matters at all – for example you could use CSS margin -9999px, CSS display:none or CSS visibility:hidden.

The outcome to the user is the same, they can’t see the content.

It’d be interesting to find out if Google are processing the page literally looking for visible content and actually don’t care how/why it isn’t visible, just that the user can actually read it.

By: Jason Mun

Jason Mun — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:23:00 +0000

I can see where John is coming from. I have encountered situations where I search for something in Google, clicked through and did not see the intended content. Either it was tabbed or in a div carousel. Breaking tabs in to individual URLs seems logical but what about the other on-site elements? For example, if it was a page about a credit card product and there are tabs outlining: features, interest rate, application and faq. Above this table of tabbed content, there’s usually an introductory paragraph and a heading. Creating a “somewhat” duplicated set of pages. Dan you are right, it conflicts with what Amit said about the Panda update. I think most websites who go down this route will need to rethink their IA and make sure that the heading and intro paragraph is as unique as possible and provides value to the user.

Do you think using AJAX and pushState() to have each tab indexed separately as separate URLs could be a potential solution?

Keen to hear everyone’s thoughts…

By: David Amerland

David Amerland — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Wow! This seems to be counter-intuitive. Landing pages that overload the user with everything do not generally score well on the UI experience and may not even count high on Google. Obviously, this kind of page would get indexed properly as John suggests. I know Google recently took out a patent that appears to allow it to actually index content that’s hidden behind a form (usually products with many variables) in an effort to index the ‘hidden’ web. Now we are getting that relatively simple tabs create an indexing problem an SEO issue usually associated with 2007/08. It appears (and I am willing to be proved wrong here) that Google’s indexing development is very much a two-speed one. On the one hand we get experimental, super-fast AI-driven semantic search that practically understand what it indexes and on the other hand we get ‘dumb’ indexing issues like this.