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.
Does collapsing content impact Google SEO signals?
-
Recently I have been promoting custom long form content development for major brand clients. For UX reasons we collapse the content so only 2-3 sentences of the first paragraph are visible. However there is a "read more" link that expands the entire content piece.
I have believed that the searchbots would have no problem crawling, indexing and applying a positive SEO signal for this content. However I'm starting to wonder. Is there any evidence that the Google search algorithm could possible discount or even ignore collapsed content? -
Thanks EGOL. Still looking for additional evidence about this.
-
well.. yup. I know many SEOs that do think that the collapsable are is just not important enough for google to consider it
good luck
-
If I see a study, I'll post a link here.
-
Yep I completely agree with your response. Unfortunately I'm in a position where I manage major enterprise accounts with multiple stakeholders (including some people are not educated in SEO). Every major change we propose needs to be documented, cited and reviewed. When making an argument for content expansion I would need to use thorough research example (Moz study, documentation on search engine land, etc).
Anyway thank for taking the time to share your feedback and advice on this thread. Although this is not the answer I wanted to hear (i.e. Google doesn't respect collapsed content)...however it's very likely accurate. This is a serious SEO issue that needs to be addressed.
-
Are there any case studies about this issue?
Just the one that I published above. The conclusion is... be prepared to sacrifice 80% of your traffic if you hide your valuable content behind a preview.
I would be asking the UX people to furnish studies that hiding content produces better sales.
We have lots of people raving about the abundance of content on our site, the detailed product descriptions, how much help we give them to decide what to purchase. All of this content is why we dominate the SERPs in our niche and that, in many people's eyes, is a sign of credibility. Lots of people say... "we bought from you because your website is so helpful". However, if we didn't have all of this content in the open these same people would have never even found us.
Nobody has to read this stuff. I would rather land on a website and see my options than land on a website and assume that they was no information because I didn't notice that the links to open it were in faded microfont because the UX guys wanted things to be tidy. I believe that it is a bigger sin to have fantastic content behind a clickthorugh than it is to put valuable information in the open and allow people to have the opportunity to read it.
Putting our content out in the open is what makes our reputation.
I sure am glad that I am the boss here. I can make the decisions and be paid on the basis of my performance.
-
We are applying 500 to 800+ word custom content blocks for our client landing pages (local landing pages) that shows a preview of the first paragraph and a "read more" expansion link. We know that most website visitors only care about the location info of these particular landing pages. We also know that our client UX teams would certainly not approve an entire visible content block on these pages.
Are there any case studies about this issue? I'm trying to find a bona fide research project to help back up our argument. -
It was similar to a Q&A. There was a single sentence question and a paragraph of hidden answer. This page had a LOT of questions and a tremendous amount of keywords in the hidden content. Thousands of words.
The long tail traffic tanked. Then, when we opened the content again the traffic took months to start coming back. The main keywords held in the SERPs. The longtail accounted for the 80% loss.
-
How collapsed was your content? Did you hide the entire block? Only show a few sentences? I'm trying to find a research article about this. This is a MAJOR issue to consider for our SEO campaigns.
-
Yes that is a very legitimate concern of mine. We have invested significant resources into custom long form content for our clients and we are very concerned this all for nothing...or possibly worse (discounting content).
-
Recently i a had related issue with a top ranking website for very competitive queries.
Unfortunately the product department made some changes to the content (UI only) without consulting SEO department. The only worth to mention change they made was to move the first two paragraphs into a collapsible DIV showing only the first 3 lines + a "read more" button. The text in collapsible div was crawlable and visible to SE's. (also it's worth to mention that these paragrap
But the site lost its major keywords positions 2-3 days later.Of-course we reverted the changes back but still two months later, the keywords are very slowly moving back to their "original" positions.
For years i believed in what Google stated, that you can use collapsible content if you are not trying to inject keywords or trying to inflate the amount of content etc. Not anymore.
I believe that placing the content under a collapsible div element, we are actually signaling google that this piece of content is not that important (that's why it is hidden, right? Otherwise it should be in plain sight). So why we should expect from google to take this content as a major part of our contents ranking factor weight.
-
About two years ago I had collapsed content on some important pages. Their longtail traffic went into a steady slide, but the head traffic held. I attribute this to a sign that the collapsed content was discounted, removing it from, or lowering its ability to count in the rankings for long tail queries.
I expanded the page, making all content visible. A few months later, longtail traffic started to slowly rise. It took many months to climb back to previous levels.
After this, every word of my content is now in the open.
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
-
SEO on Jobs sites: how to deal with expired listings with "Google for Jobs" around
Dear community, When dealing with expired job offers on jobs sites from a SEO perspective, most practitioners recommend to implement 301 redirects to category pages in order to keep the positive ranking signals of incoming links. Is it necessary to rethink this recommendation with "Google for Jobs" is around? Google's recommendations on how to handle expired job postings does not include 301 redirects. "To remove a job posting that is no longer available: Remove the job posting from your sitemap. Do one of the following: Note: Do NOT just add a message to the page indicating that the job has expired without also doing one of the following actions to remove the job posting from your sitemap. Remove the JobPosting markup from the page. Remove the page entirely (so that requesting it returns a 404 status code). Add a noindex meta tag to the page." Will implementing 301 redirects the chances to appear in "Google for Jobs"? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grnjbs07175 -
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
Does google ignore ? in url?
Hi Guys, Have a site which ends ?v=6cc98ba2045f for all its URLs. Example: https://domain.com/products/cashmere/robes/?v=6cc98ba2045f Just wondering does Google ignore what is after the ?. Also any ideas what that is? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarolynSC0 -
Same content, different languages. Duplicate content issue? | international SEO
Hi, If the "content" is the same, but is written in different languages, will Google see the articles as duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chalet
If google won't see it as duplicate content. What is the profit of implementing the alternate lang tag?Kind regards,Jeroen0 -
Having 2 brands with the same content - will this work from an SEO perspective
Hi All, I would love if someone could help and provide some insights on this. We're a financial institution and have a set of products that we offer. We have recently joined with another brand and will now be offering all our products to their customers. What we are looking to do is have 1 site that masks the content for both sites so it appears as there are 2 seperate brands with different content - in fact we have a main site and then a sister brand that offers the same products. Is there anyway to do this so when someone searches for Credit Card from Brand A it is indexed under Brand A and same when someone searched for Credit Card from Brand B it is indexed under Brand B. The one thing is we would not want to rel:can the pages nor be penalised by googles latest PR algorithm. Hope someone can help! Thanks Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFCU1 -
How search engines look at collapse content in mobile while on desktop it open by default?
Hello everyone!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Roi_Bar
To have a mobile friendly UX we chose to collapse some of the page content.
On the desktop it is in open mode by default and user can see the whole content.
Does the search engines see the content even if it's collapse? is the collapse mode on the mobile only can hurt us with SERP ranking? okgF0pX 1LU6utU1 -
Help FORUM ( User generated content ) SEO best practices
Hello Moz folks ! For the very first time im dealing with a massive community who rely on UGC ( user generated content ). Their forum is finding a great deal of duplicate content/broken link/ duplicate title and on-site issue. I have Advance SEO knowledge related to ecommerce or blogging but new to forum and UGC. I would really love to learn or get ressources links that would allow me to see/understand the best practices in term of SEO. Any help is greatly appreciated. Best, Yan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ydesjardins2000 -
Google crawling different content--ever ok?
Here are a couple of scenarios I'm encountering where Google will crawl different content than my users on initial visit to the site--and which I think should be ok. Of course, it is normally NOT ok, I'm here to find out if Google is flexible enough to allow these situations: 1. My mobile friendly site has users select a city, and then it displays the location options div which includes an explanation for why they may want to have the program use their gps location. The user must choose the gps, the entire city, or he can enter a zip code, or choose a suburb of the city, which then goes to the link chosen. OTOH it is programmed so that if it is a Google bot it doesn't get just a meaningless 'choose further' page, but rather the crawler sees the page of results for the entire city (as you would expect from the url), So basically the program defaults for the entire city results for google bot, but for for the user it first gives him the initial ability to choose gps. 2. A user comes to mysite.com/gps-loc/city/results The site, seeing the literal words 'gps-loc' in the url goes out and fetches the gps for his location and returns results dependent on his location. If Googlebot comes to that url then there is no way the program will return the same results because the program wouldn't be able to get the same long latitude as that user. So, what do you think? Are these scenarios a concern for getting penalized by Google? Thanks, Ted
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0