Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Do you think using accordion text can hurt SEO?
-
I have a lot of text for my home page. My plan is to a J Query Plugin for accordion text. Does anyone think that this can hurt SEO efforts?
-
Thanks for the clarification EGOL, very useful!
For other users, here's the link to hidden text EGOL is talking about.
-
Google the hidden text.
-
Hi Janice,
I have also been wondering the same thing. Although the above replies may have been relevant in 2012, now things seem to have changed. Being from a design background accordions and tabs have always been useful for both visuals and UX, but after reading Barry Schwartz’s article my outlook has changed and a work-around is required.
To conclude the above article, Google are stating hidden content is deemed as unimportant to the user so is 'discounted' and this is something that has been done for a while. If you want your content to have a positive impact on your page ranking it's better left visible unless it's something like FAQ and/or you're not interested in optimising the content on that page. Other members of Moz may have more information on this than me.
Thanks
-
Thanks guys
-
We use accordions all of the time and it always gets indexed. Make sure to check that it's not stuck in some sort of JavaScript and you'll be fine.
-
The accordion type text are most likely indexed by Google and does not affect SEO.
The spiders don't really view pages like humans, and you can actually use Webmaster Tools to see what the spider sees(if that makes sense).
But you can also check View Source to see what is on the page, and if it shows the text it is most likely indexed and searchable by Google.
Hope that helped.
-
If you google any of the text on this FAQ page you will see that google has it indexed.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is Wix still terrible for SEO?
In Australia, I hear it over and over again that Wix is literally the worst site builder you can use due to it's poor site build for SEO. Has anyone here got some tangible reasons for why this is? As I am constantly getting asked this by clients who are using Wix and want me to help with their SEO.
On-Page Optimization | | UndergrndMarketing0 -
Harms of hidden categories on SEO
On our website we have some invisible/hidden categories on our site. Can anyone advise whether these are harmful in terms of SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Can you use the canonical tag and rel=next and rel=prev on category pages.
We have a conflict of information between our web developers and our SEO company. We are an on-line retail company hence we have a fair number of different categories. Our site is set up with the rel=next and rel=prev tags. Our SEO company have asked us to implement canonical links on our category pages and leave the rel=next and rel=prev tags as they are. Our web developers are saying by doing this we are asking Google to ignore all of our products on all of the pages except page 1 which would mean Google would not index a lot of our products. I have looked at a few articles but I am struggling to understand which way to go. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Palmbourne0 -
Less Tags better for SEO?
I am currently reviewing my strategy when it comes to categories and tags on my site. Having been no-indexed for some time, and having many tags with just one entry I am thinking that this is not optimal for SEO purposes. This is what I am planning: Categories - Change these to Index, but only after adding a hundred words or so by way of introduction (see this example - https://www.besthostnews.com/news/hosting/a-small-orange-news/). With the categories I am thinking of highlighting key articles as well to improve link juice distribution to older articles that are important. Tags - About half my tags have only 1 entry, with a few more just having 2 entries. I am thinking of deleting all tags with just one entry, and trying to merge those with just two or 3 entries where it makes sense to do so. I will keep these as no-index, but I think this will mean more optimal distribution of link juice within the site. I would appreciate your thoughts \ suggestions on the best practices here.
On-Page Optimization | | TheWebMastercom0 -
Using a dash or underscores in file names.
Is it better to use a dash or an underscore in file names to improve SEO? EX memory_flash.jpg or memory-flash.jpg Or does it make no difference?
On-Page Optimization | | Robotnik0 -
Does Bolding Text Have Any Impact on SEO?
Someone told me it does but I thought that was old school way of thinking. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | tryfantasy1 -
Text within a Div Crawlable?
Hi, I have a paragraph of text contained within a Div container ( ).. Is this readable by a search engine spider. Or is it better to enclose it within ? Thanks for any feedback.
On-Page Optimization | | IBMEMM0 -
Does having a "+" in a URL hurt SEO? Would much value be gained changing it to a hyphen?
There's a site that contains "+" signs in the URL in order to call different information for the content on the page. Would it be better to change those to hyphens (-), or not that much value will be gained, so leave them as is? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | MitchellStoker0