Years ago, despite several case studies in SEO, Google said that content hidden inside collapsed and expandable tabs (accordions) would be fully indexed and ranked. reported. Well, Dan Shure tested it again, and he said, “No, it’s not.”
Posted in Dan twitter After he decided to default to showing content that was hidden behind an accordion dropdown, he saw a significant lift in the rankings of “very competitive” terms. He added that in this situation the content is in an above-the-fold position and this is in both mobile and desktop interfaces. He said that showing it to users by default, meaning that users don’t have to click to expand the content, shows that content ranks higher. He also said that while the content was collapsed, it was rendered entirely in HTML, so Googlebot saw it and indexed it, but it didn’t rank well.
Dan shared this Google Search Console chart showing the increase.
As a reminder, in 2018 Google said the case study was wrong, and Google first told us this in 2016. On mobile, content hidden in accordions, tabs, etc. for user experience purposes is fully respected and not demoted. did in the past Google has checked this message many times, but we need to check it again.
So the lesson here is to test and see for yourself. If the collapsible content feature can be easily removed, give it a try and see how it goes. See if it hurts the user experience and if it improves your ranking. Every site is different and every query has its own landscape, so test it.
forum discussion at twitter.
Update: John Mueller of Google was asked to reply to this and he said:
This anecdote doesn’t make sense, but YMMV. IMO it is often a better user experience to show content by default. I love seeing SEO test what’s reasonable, and I love seeing results either way. I don’t think this needs a “you need to run X” message from Google.
— 🐐 John 🐐 (@JohnMu) March 10, 2022
You read too much into it – not everything is an SEO factor :-). A better UX is a good thing, even if nothing else changes.
— 🐐 John 🐐 (@JohnMu) March 10, 2022
