Google Will Ignore ‘Click To Expand’ and Tabbed Content
Website owners have recently been reporting to have seen that content that had been placed into areas in which the content is made less intrusive to a user has been seen to be struggling to find its way into the index and it seems that during the latest Google Webmaster hangout with John Mueller we now know why those areas of content could be failing to return.
Mueller was asked about the ‘click to expand' javascript examples directly and about how Google treated those areas following on from their decision to render pages as a visitor to a specific site would see and John explained that Google feel that they should make use of the content that is visible at the time of accessing the site as a user.
This means that Google discount information that is hidden within tabbed areas, content within click to expand boxes and anything that would generally result in the content being invisible to the user without interaction on their behalf, stating that Google believe that it could become confusing if a user was to click through to the resulting site from their search engine results and the content not be immediately available for them to see, labelling the users experience potentially ‘misleading'.
Although sometimes the inclusion of large areas of content can result in pages being oversized and sometimes daunting, it seems that Google, who have always maintained that you should build your site for the user, doesn't like the UX steps taken to allow the user to focus on their main reason for visiting the site in some instances.
John answers the question at 10 minutes 45 seconds into the video, which you can see below:
With that now out in the open, albeit that this seems to be a longer running thing for Google than many knew about, if you are using these boxes are you looking to ditch them in favour of having that content found or will you make use of this information to allow the use of duplicate elements that could be found?
14 Comments
Jeremy Rivera - http://www.jeremyriveraseo.com
Actually, this make a lot of sense from a preventing spam and abuse viewpoint. If they gave full credit for that content then you could really stuff the crap out of a page with content without fear that users would not actually view it and have a bad experience.
Fran Irwin - http://franirwin.com
What about expanding dividers?
SitePenalise - https://www.sitepenalise.fr
I think it’s normal that the robot doesn’t take into consideration hard to see/hidden content, i work with many elderly people, and they have absolutely NO IDEA that they can expand zones or menus.
In fact this kind of UX is designed for geeks by geeks ( sorry to send a bit of a troll here ), but it’s not usable to the average person.
Vicki - http://www.freeseoresource.com
Good … I’m not too wild on these gimmicky display methods … there are so many scripts on pages these days that it inhibits the web viewing experience for users instead of enhancing it!
Ewan
Can understand Google’s rationale here with SERP – Page expectations, however given Google are so regimented on what kind of layout/design is easiest for them to interpret, its becoming increasingly hard to fit users expectations along with those of search engines.
Susanta Sahoo - http://www.susanta.com
I totally agree with Vicki. I don’t like websites hiding their content behind tabs. I believe designs that enable users to browse through the pages with minimal clicks.
Alan Bleiweiss
At this point I have yet to find where they are not indexing tabbed or “click for more” content. All of my tests show they are still indexing it on the sites I’ve tested.
Whether they are not assigning as much “unique content”, “trust” or “quality” signal strength to these is a guess at this point.
Given the stance John communicated, the best policy if you rely heavily on Google is to split it out to unique URLs. So that then becomes the question – how important is that to you in your unique situation? And is doing so truly harmful to visitors, or helpful, if you step away from “do it for Google”?
Daniel - http://www.etaktiker.ch
It makes perfect sense… As an advanced user landing on a “big piece of content” I often search the page for the keyword I’m interested in. If this does not work (like for tabs or stuff hidden by js), then I’m not happy with the search result and bounce back to the SERPs…
David Sottimano - http://www.davidsottimano.com
Any examples?
Jeff Carpenter
I agree with Alan. I’ve used this tactic very successfully for years, and when the recent news first came out, spent days reviewing content that was located in these zones. Even new pages have the content crawled. The only thing left to test is to see if a unique phrase or block of content placed in one of these zones, and see if the page ranks for it.
Paul Mist - http://www.webstarsltd.com
Like most things there’s compromise to be found. Hiding important content within a page often seems like a bad idea, but sometimes it makes sense for secondary pieces of information not crucial to the users experience on the page.
As ever, it is important to sign-post your content allowing for easy discovery by the user. Here’s one of Google’s own pages for example:
https://support.google.com/inbox/answer/6067579?hl=en
You can see they are hiding content, but it is explained and titled well. It’s these key bits of visible information that will allow the user not only to discover what they need while visually scanning the page, but also (I assume) for it to be found via search terms.
As usual content is key, and planning it as part of the design process is of utmost importance.
Damon - http://www.theseoconcept.com
I’m pretty comfortable with this and it make sense to me. I find with 95% of my clients that blog posts are the main point of entry anyway and it would be pretty unusual to have a click-to-expand box that has the main message of the post in it.
Ben Sibley - http://www.backlinksentry.com
@Paul great example coming from Google themselves 🙂
Hiding content, such as in that example, is often easier for users to browse. I’m seeing this a lot with sites hiding comments and requiring a click to show them. I actually like it a lot since the scrollbar isn’t tiny if there are loads of comments.
The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/us) has an interesting compromise: they show a few comments by default and then use a “show more” button, along with pagination.
Heather
In the past Google didn’t see JavaScript on sites so using JavaScript to hide content seemed like a SEO friendly approach. If someone has found that hiding content with JavaScript ends up hiding content from Google search indexing, I’d like to hear about it. I plan to test that.