How much of an issue is JS?

[SwanseaMedicine]

Hey folks,

So, I got two pages. Page A has a lot more content but in a tabular format which uses javascript and a Title Tag which is a synonym for our keyword, but not the actual keyword.  Page B has less content, and the title tag is the exact keyword phrase we want to rank for. Page A has a bigger backlink profile (though not enormous by any extent).

Page A ranks in 30th. Page B ranks in 7th.

Importance of Title tag? Importance of JS? Both?

Discuss!

Cheers,

Rhys

[Tenlo]

Without knowing more I would guess the issue is tabbed content does not perform as well as content that is always displayed on a page.  Always look to your content first, then worry about things like title tags.

[SwanseaMedicine]

Hey Michael,

Thanks for your response. The question is, I suppose, why does it not rank as well? Does Google not value it as highly? Or does it struggle to fetch and render it because it's tabbed? It does seem to be the biggest factor, in my opinion, in the difference between the two pages.

Cheers,

Rhys

[Tenlo]

Google is all about serving the best experience with the best content. When you put tabbed content on a website, especially if the tabs serve multiple topics, you are watering down that page.  Also because a portion of the content starts at hidden, it makes a worse UX experience for a user to directly get to your content (because they have to click).

[davebuts]

Hi SwanseaMedicine,

Have a read of this hidden content experiment by Reboot Online: https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/hidden-text-experiment/

It was a very well-run experiment and, in summary, they found that visible content outperformed hidden content.

However, this will change once Google's mobile-first index rolls out (sometime in 2018?) where hidden content will be given full weight (source).

Cheers,

David