Hidden/Expandable Content & Rankings

[Nat]

I've done a bit of research on this, and there seems to be a past consensus that Google probably devalues content that is hidden behind tabs or JavaScript/JQuery & CSS. Plenty of good reasons to collapse and expand certain details, and its often because they are non-essential.

But what about collapsing most of a page's essential information? Threads like this get me wondering. I have never in my entire life Google searched for something and wanted to read a 2,000 word article. Much less 5,000.

Table of contents at the top? Unless it starts floating in the sidebar, I'm going to scroll by, get several screens under, and then be annoyed that whatever long tail keyword brought me here is burred deep. Time is our commodity, and I don't see my generation getting any more patient when it comes to monstrosities of length.

For a broad skyscraper article or an article with extremely wide coverage, I would (personally) much rather see a short intro and then have most of the <h2>'s (or the <h3>'s under the <h2>'s) collapsed like this:

Or one of the "read more" fogs.

On the other hand, I definitely don't want to un-collapse everything inside a skyscraper article that I want to read most of... There are some I want to skim through, and the above would be annoying.

But, if I land on a massive informational page for tourism in the state of North Carolina, I'm almost never ever going to want to read more than 20% of it -- assuming it looked something like:

Intro: Why NC is awesome
- Top Attractions
-- Top Attractions for Couples
--- Top Attractions for Honeymooners
-- Top Attractions for Families
...
- Top Places to Visit
-- Top Tours
--...
---...
- Top Restaurants
...
- Top Hotels
- Famous local tattoo artists
...
- Statistics on the state

In terms of user experience, it seems to me that excessive use of collapsing could be very nice in some scenarios and err on obnoxious in others. And this seems like the type of distinction that would be very hard for an algorithm to judge. Besides bounce rates, maybe.

Is it worth collapsing large amounts of content that you can assume most people will only want one sub-heading of? Also, are there any "preferred ways" or "best practices" when it comes to collapsing content? I've just been using JQuery that changes display:none; and then animates.

 

[stackcash]

I think the first thing that needs to be done is to test just how much a page / content is devalued from the tabbed content. It could be negligible at best.

If it's significant, you could just split the massive article into several smaller articles - all with their own url. Then, you could have a custom sidebar that acts as a table of contents for the main article and all the new sub-articles (that used to be your H2 / H3) sections. This is essentially creating a silo just for the main topic of the article. It also removes the need to use tabbed content and gets rid of that overwhelming feeling of staring down a 5,000 word tome.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

I've regularly seen pages where the stuff in tabs/revealing sliders STILL isn't even indexed despite Google being able to/saying they sometimes will. It seems particularly common in more aggressively commercial niches. So proceed with caution and make sure it's indexed...

Absolutely agree with the 'pain' readers feel when something is monster and all on one page. You can correctly set up a multi-page guide (https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html) to allow you to split up a massive post in to coherent sections and allow Google to send the weird long-tail query to the 5th page where it's buried, but the bulk to the 'head' of the guide.

 

[Nat]

I think the first thing that needs to be done is to test just how much a page / content is devalued from the tabbed content. It could be negligible at best.

True. Hoping someone on here might have experience/insight with this already.

If it's significant, you could just split the massive article into several smaller articles - all with their own url. Then, you could have a custom sidebar that acts as a table of contents for the main article and all the new sub-articles (that used to be your H2 / H3) sections. This is essentially creating a silo just for the main topic of the article. It also removes the need to use tabbed content and gets rid of that overwhelming feeling of staring down a 5,000 word tome.

Personally I don't have a monster article. But I have a group of pages that have sections that are incredibly diverse. I want them all in 1 place because I want each of these pages staying uniform.

I've regularly seen pages where the stuff in tabs/revealing sliders STILL isn't even indexed despite Google being able to/saying they sometimes will. It seems particularly common in more aggressively commercial niches. So proceed with caution and make sure it's indexed...

Absolutely agree with the 'pain' readers feel when something is monster and all on one page. You can correctly set up a multi-page guide (https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html) to allow you to split up a massive post in to coherent sections and allow Google to send the weird long-tail query to the 5th page where it's buried, but the bulk to the 'head' of the guide.

Darn... you're right, one page I published the other week was indexed almost immediately, but the collapsed content isn't indexed. I guess I need to either re-code my accordion short-code to see if a different style (fog of war-ish) will get picked up, or just do away with it.

That's a great link, thanks for the share!

 

[Wills]

I've seen quite a few sites ranking for big keywords with some or even all of the relevant content in accordions, so it definitely works.

I also read a few places in the last ~6 months something to the effect of Google no longer discounting (or as alluded to, probably just devaluing to an extent), content that's hidden behind accordians or tabs. I haven't seen any direct study comparing the same content out in the open vs more hidden, but from what I've seen and read, it seems to be okay.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Just a heads up... More discussion on this topic here: How does display: none; affect SEO?

It features some pretty definitive answers to some of the questions surrounding the practice.