Any alternative techniques to display tabbed content without using Javascript / JSON and be SEO Friendly?

[Fergclaw]

John Mueller's input in the EGWMH hangout suggests that Google MAY ignore expandable content served by Javascript. Are there any alternative techniques to display tabbed content without using Javascript / JSON and be SEO Friendly?

I do however view these as good for website interactivity and UX - and see many examples of websites performing well and ranking highly whilst using these techniques - are there any Google friendly ways to serve content on a page so that search bots can recognise and choose to crawl / consume the content as legitimate fodder?

[max.favilli]

It all depends on the page code. In general I would not be scared about using JS in your page. But it all depends on how you use it. It's a vast topic.

Let me try to reduce it to something very small. As far as you serve browsers an html page which includes all the content you want google to index, you are probably safe. When you serve an html page with a portion of that content and you load additional content with AJAX, you are almost sure google won't index it properly.

Google notoriously penalize pages which tries to stuff content for google bot manipulating it with JS to hide it from real visitors eyes. That's bad.

But in between are endless possibilities and it all comes to what your JS is doing. So it's hard to define a general rule.

Said that, today you can find examples of tabbed content in pure CSS: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=pure%20css%20tabs

Like this nice one: http://codepen.io/wallaceerick/pen/ojtal

But, also CSS has it's drawbacks, mainly browsers support: http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_browsersupport.asp