How does product category description affect SEO?

[Shirapn]

Hi - we are a website that sells tours. We have category pages that list the tours in that category (by city, by length of time, theme, etc). At the top of each category page, before the buttons linking to the tours, there is a category description. It is a pretty long paragraph. We are redesigning the website and think it would look nicer to show 2-3 lines of text and then have a down arrow and 'read' more so people can click and it would expand to show the full category description if they want to read it and it won't take up so much room that way. My question is - will this affect SEA at all? Or because the text is still there, just hidden, it won't do anything? Our site ranks very high in organic searches on google and we do not want to do anything that will hurt SEO. thanks.

[Rajesh.Prajapati]

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[Shirapn]

added

[Rajesh.Prajapati]

You can remove category description from top and keep in bottom due to Your mobile version doesn't have category description on both position. According first mobile indexing, Google is reading your mobile version at this time.  There is no issue with practice you are looking for the same.

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Shirapn

I think it is perfectly acceptable to use an accordion to 'read more'. However, according to Rand Fishkin, who did a study on this a couple of years back, the page with the hidden text will not rank as highly as it did with the page visible. They will not treat the hidden text with the same weight as it would if it were visible.

https://moz.com/blog/google-css-javascript-hidden-text

It is far better to have the text visible. One of the ways around this would be to have a couple of lines at the top of the page and then add the rest of the text under the category content.

I hope that helps - watch the above video - it's very clear.

Nigel