Googlebot and "hidden" content inside dynamically displayed (js based) tabs on a page - Impact on SERPS?

Question

Let them say that someone has “legally” hidden content inside the page.

To explain this further, imagine the following:

<div id="tab-one">This is the content inside tab one</div> <div id="tab-two">This is the content inside tab two</div> <a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="document.getElementById('tab-one').style.display='block';document.getElementById('tab-two').style.display='none';">Tab one</a> <a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="document.getElementById('tab-one').style.display='none';document.getElementById('tab-two').style.display='block';">Tab two</a> 

From a seo point of view, suggesting that none of this is done to manipulate Google. And actually, tab two contains spam-free, relevant data, how does this affect SEO?

Will the googlebot pointer and conciser be “hidden” content as part of the page content?

Will it use this content in the same way as if the content was “visible” on the page without using javacscript?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I do not believe that in the past there was an official Google response on this topic, however from experience I can tell you that Google will index tabbed content just fine. You will even see SEO traffic from content. If your site is pretty clean, I would not have to worry about it being marked as “hidden content” if the content is available for user actions (for example, click) and is clearly accessible for click.

However, you will want to consider this. Say, for example, part of the contents of a hidden tab is a description of the product, for example, "safe for children." If users search for “child-friendly products” and they come to your site through a search engine, they probably won’t immediately see this information because they don’t know that it is buried behind a tab.

Most users do not spend much time hunting, so for the user they may not find content and refuse, because they do not think that they found the necessary information that they were looking for. If you agree with the idea that Google and Bing use search terms as a search signal, this could potentially “damage” your SEO.

Personally, if this is not tertiary information, I would not put it behind a tab if it was not important for Ux. In my experience, users are not against scrolling if the information is relevant ... but they usually have a “tab” of blindness or only really interact with “hidden” elements when they are part of navigation or already in a transactional stream.

ps An alternative is to use crawlable AJAX or pushState () so that individual tabs are indexed separately by their own URLs. But you will want to be careful ... if you are viewing the main content in the “pages” tab, you may have a problem with duplicate content. If that makes sense, you can use the rel = "next" and rel = "prev" option released by Google (but only supported by Google right now).

Answer 2

In Webmaster Tools, you'll find the Fetch as Google option. There you can see how Google crawls the page. I noticed that some JavaScript carousel libraries are being scanned, while others are not. It's just a question of how Google can read JavaScript code.

As far as succeeds, it doesn't look like all hidden content is bad. Content is still scanned (as you will see when you extract it). Now, if there was an abundance of content with keywords, it would be susceptible to a fine.

Used correctly, it is definitely still useful.

Answer 3

Hidden content will be crawled, and this is not a problem for Google, many sites have such a menu. I believe that hidden tabs are not keywords that are useful to users, so you should not worry about this - this is useful for the user and googlebot!