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  4. Ranking penalty for "accordion" content -- hidden prior to user interaction

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Ranking penalty for "accordion" content -- hidden prior to user interaction

Technical SEO
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  • houlihanlokey
    houlihanlokey last edited by Jan 10, 2018, 8:25 PM

    Will content inside an "accordion" module be ranked as non-hidden content?

    Is there an official guide by google and other search engines addressing this?

    Example of accordion element: https://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/components/collapse/#accordion-example

    Will all elements in the example above be seen + treated equally by search engines?

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
    • GlennFerrell
      GlennFerrell Subscriber last edited by Jan 12, 2018, 1:56 PM Jan 12, 2018, 1:56 PM

      Although I have no active accordions at the moment, I do have bootstrap tabs and all of the hidden content within the tabs is crawled.  To test your own page, go to webmaster tools and Fetch as Google. When fetching is done, click on the page link and select the tab "Fetching". This shows all of the HTML crawled and you can verify that the content in the accordion has been crawled. You also mentioned "penalty". Google's policy on penalties for hidden content is here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66353?hl=en.  Google would not consider tabs and accordions containing legitimate content (no white text etc.) to fall under this "Hidden text and links" category.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • bill369
        bill369 last edited by Jan 11, 2018, 1:00 PM Jan 11, 2018, 1:00 PM

        Content inside an "accordion" module can be seen by Google for example if read more button is clicked to display more text. This is not hidden content and do not have to worry.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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