Duplicate content hidden behind tabs

[McTaggart]

Just looking at an ecommerce website and they've hidden their product page's duplicate content behind tabs on the product pages - not on purpose, I might add.

Is this a legitimate way to hide duplicate content, now that Google has lowered the importance and crawlability of content hidden behind tabs? Is this a legitimate tactic to tackle duplicate content?

Your thoughts would be welcome. Thanks, Luke

[JordanLowry]

I would think you would want to create unique content and either remove duplicate content or implement rel=canonicals. I would imagine hiding duplicated content could be seen as manipulative to Google.

[beaupedraza]

Hey Luke,

General rule or theory is that content behind tabs is "indexed but discounted" due to it not being visible without some digging. In the wild, I've seen e-commerce websites move both towards tabs (less for the reasons that you mentioned and more for sortability & end-user experience needs) or away from tabs (letting the content & product specs work for the site in terms of crawl and relevance on search). A good example of the latter would be Amazon.

Hope this answers your question fully.

-Beau

[McTaggart]

Thanks for your feedback Beau and Jordan - very helpful Luke