Is tabbed content okay or bad for SEO? Google takes both sides.

[jamiestu13]

Hello Moz Community!

It seems like there are two opinions coming from directly from Google on tabbed content:

1) John Mueller says here that content is indexed but discounted

2) Matt Cutts says here that if you're not using tabs deceptively, you're in good shape

I see this has been discussed in the Moz Q & A before, but I have an interesting situation:

The pages I am building have  ~50% static content, and ~50%  tabbed content (only two tabs). Showing all tabbed content at once is not an option.

Since the tabbed content will make up 50% of the total content, it's important that it is 100% weighted by Google. I can think of two ways to show it:

1) Standard tabs using jQuery

Advantage: Both tab 1 and tab 2's content indexed

Disadvantage: Tabbed content may be discounted?

2) Make the content of the tabs conditional on the server side

website.com/page/ only shows tab 1's content in html

website.com/page/?tab=2 only shows tab 2's content in the html. Include rel="canonical" pointing to website.com/page/.

Advantage: Content of tab 1 indexed & 100% counted by Google

Disadvantage: Content of tab 2 not indexed

Which option is best? Is there a better solution?

[EGOL]

Yep.  People argue about this stuff.  The horses mouth even talks both ways.

So, if you hide your content behind tabs, you are gambling that Google is not going to respect that content today or tomorrow or at sometime in the future - even if they are doing differently now.

The only safe bet that I see is to display all of your content.  So, I have bet ALL of my chips on zero content hidden in tabs.  Zero content hidden in any way.

Showing all tabbed content at once is not an option.

Why not?

I don't use tabs for search engine reasons but I also don't use them to make sure that all of my content is out in the open for the visitor.  Some people don't know about tabs.   People who are old, have vision problems, are in a hurry, are not websavvy, are using a tiny screen, those people and many more have a good chance of missing your tabs.

I am getting all of my content out there for everyone especially Google.  Google has hated hidden content since 1998.  White text on white background might have been the first Google penalties.

**Which option is best? **

If you ask me, this is like one of those bad jokes, Door A or Door B and there is bad stuff behind both of them.  If you think you know how Google treats them today you might be wrong and if you think you know how they will treat them tomorrow there is even a bigger chance that you will be wrong.

Is there a better solution?

Display all text.  Search engines have always read it, probably always will read it.  Do different at your own risk.

[jamiestu13]

Thanks for your input Egol! 9/10 times I would agree with your thoughts exactly and go with nothing hidden.

**Why not?  **

The product has benefits that are described with completely different language to two target markets. The point of the tabs is to be able to effectively sell to people we know to belong to each market. So actually we don't need people to understand/use the tabs, they would exist merely to include our conditional content.

So anyways showing all content won't work well, and separate pages won't work either because of the way search goes for the niche. We'll see if I can get creative!

[AMHC]

EGOL is the man! We moved some content behind tabs, and our rankings did drop. When we moved it back out, they returned. We had some other issues/changes as well, so I can't 100% vouch for correlation.

One interesting test I did run is to run some searches for sentences that were hidden behind tabs on our site. The tabbed content was found, indicating that it was indexed by Google, so they aren't ignoring it.

We decided to go tabless, and I think we are the better for it, but who knows? If you have an enormous amount of content on a page, I would consider tabs, but I would leave the juiciest bits out in the open. FWIW.

[EGOL]

That happened to us too.  We had a huge FAQ page and decided to reduce it's length by placing the answers behind tabs.  It made the page neat, but, when that content went behind the tabs a lot of unique words were hidden.  Previously that page received a lot of long tail traffic but after the diverse words were placed behind the tabs the long tail traffic collapsed.

[AMHC]

EGOL: Makes perfect sense. This, IMHO, is a bad move by Google. They always say "Create for Humans, not Bots" but proper use of tabbed content does make for better UX. We are both eliminating tabs for rankings. Google as usual talking out of both sides of their mouth. Who wants to spend 5 minutes scrolling to the bottom of a ridiculously long page?

[AMHC]

You could display all of it and make some clever use of jump links. Just sayin...