Is this tabbed implementation of SEO copy correct (i.e. good for getting indexed and in an ok spot in the html as viewed by search bots?

[chadburgess]

We are trying to switch to a tabbed version of our team/product pages at SeatGeek.com, but where all tabs (only 2 right now) are viewed as one document by the search engines.

I am pretty sure we have this working for the most part, but would love some quick feedback from you all as I have never worked with this approach before and these pages are some of our most important.

Resources:

http://www.ericpender.com/blog/tabs-and-seo

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=03fdefb488a16343&hl=en

http://searchengineland.com/is-hiding-content-with-display-none-legitimate-seo-13643

Sample in use: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

**Old Version: **

http://screencast.com/t/BWn0OgZsXt

http://seatgeek.com/boston-celtics-tickets/

New Version with tabs:

http://screencast.com/t/VW6QzDaGt

http://screencast.com/t/RPvYv8sT2

http://seatgeek.com/miami-heat-tickets/

Notes:

• Content not displayed stacked on browser when Javascript turned off, but it is in the source code.
• Content shows up in Google cache of new page in the text version.
• In our implementation the JS is currently forcing the event to end before the default behavior of adding #about in this case to the url string - this can be changed, should it be?
• Related to this, the developer made it so that typing http://seatgeek.com/miami-heat-tickets/#about directly into the browser does not go to the tab with copy, which I imagine could be considered spammy from a human review perspective (this wasn't intentional).
• This portion of the code is below the truncated view of the fetch as Googlebot, so we didn't have that resource.
• Are there any issues with hidden text / is this too far down in the html?

Any/all feedback appreciated. I know our copy is old, we are in the process of updating it for this season.

[KaneJamison]

My general rule of thumb is that as long as all of the content is delivered via HTML (which it appears to be), and the switching of the tabs is done via javascript (which it is) than you're mostly OK.

You do have one issue though - the current code on http://seatgeek.com/miami-heat-tickets/ doesn't die gracefully.  You recognized this in your notes, but if a user doesn't have Javascript turned on, they can't access the text. That's an issue for usability, and you could make an argument that it might be bad for SEO, but either way I believe it should be fixed. When javascript isn't enabled, the content should still load below the event listings. Typically that means it should load that way automatically, and javascript should then hide the tab when the page loads and show it once they click on the tab.

Ideally the content would be made easily available (currently the tabs aren't as intuitive as they are on a Facebook page, for example). Putting them above the photo might help that?

Also, from a user perspective, the written content is mostly there for SEO purposes right now. Stuff like the price stats is cool information that I would find interesting while shopping for tickets - maybe there's a way to show that graphically on the page in a more interesting way than text?

Update - I just noticed that those stats are displayed on http://seatgeek.com/miami-heat-ticket-prices in an awesome way - do stuff like that for all of your pages!

On the same tabs topic, but separate from your implementation, I've seen companies load content from an XML file using Javascript. That is definitely not SEO friendly and can cause indexation issues.

[chadburgess]

Thanks for the helpful response. And I definitely am with you on the idea of having better data on all our pages. I initially set it up separately but have been leaning towards merging those ticket price pages with the tickets pages and killing off (301ing the price pages to the tickets pages). Make sense?

[KaneJamison]

I'd probably agree with that merge decision. Topic is basically the same, primary difference is inclusion of "price" in the keyword targeting from what I see, and that can likely be achieved with one master page.

Furthermore, having awesome data integrated like that will lead to links, because it's better than most crappy ticket sites. Big boost in PA from that leads to better rankings than just the 2 pages IMO.

[chadburgess]

Cool. When we launched them separately we overvalued the potential for ticket prices rankings and had so little respect from engines that double ranking was hard. Also, I wasn't as on my game with SEO back then.

I think merging is the way to go, I am filing it into our dev. queue for the coming weeks.