Googlebot and "hidden" content inside dynamically shown (js based) tabs within a page - Impact on SERPS?

Question

Let says someone has 'legitimately' hidden content within a page.

To explain this further, imagine the following:

<div id="tab-one">This is the content inside tab one</div>
<div id="tab-two">This is the content inside tab two</div>
<a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="document.getElementById('tab-one').style.display='block';document.getElementById('tab-two').style.display='none';">Tab one</a>
<a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="document.getElementById('tab-one').style.display='none';document.getElementById('tab-two').style.display='block';">Tab two</a>

From an seo perspective, assuming that none of this is done to manipulate google. And in fact, "tab two" contains spam free, relevant data, how does this impact seo?

Will googlebot index, and conciser the 'hidden' content as part of the content of the page?

Will it use this content in the same way as though the content was "visible" on the page without the use of javacscript?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I don't believe there's an official Google response on this topic in the past, however, from experience I can tell you that Google will index the tabbed content just fine. You'll even see SEO traffic from the content. If you're site is fairly clean, I wouldn't worry about being flagged as having "hidden content", as long as the content is accessible by user action (e.g. clicking), and obviously clickable.

However, you'll want to consider this. Say for example, some of the content in a hidden tab is a product description such as "child safe". If a users is looking for "child safe products", and they arrive at your site through a search engine, they probably won't immediate see that information because they don't know it's buried behind a tab.

Most users don't spend a lot of time hunting, so to a user they might not find the content and bounce because they don't feel like they found the relevant information they were looking for. If you subscribe to the idea that Google and Bing use search query refinements as a search signal, this could potentially "harm" your SEO.

Personally, unless it's truly tertiary information, I wouldn't put it behind a tab unless crucial to the Ux. From my experience, users don't mind scrolling if the information is relevant ... but they tend to have "tab" blindness or only really interact with "hidden" elements when it's part of the navigation or already in a transactional flow.

p.s. An alternative is to use crawlable AJAX or pushState() to have the individual tabs indexed separately on their own URLs. But you'll want to be careful ... if you're rendering out the main content on the tab "pages", you might have a duplicate content concern. If it makes sense, you can potentially use the rel="next" and rel="prev" spec that Google released (but only supported by Google right now).

Answer 2

In Webmaster Tools you will find the option to Fetch as Google. There you can see just how Google is crawling the page. I've noticed some JavaScript carousel libraries are crawled, while others aren't. It's just a matter of how Google is able to read the JavaScript code.

As far as impact goes, it's not like all hidden content is bad. The content is still crawled (As you will see with the fetch). Now if there was an abundance of keyword-stuffed content, that would be susceptible to penalty.

Used correctly, it's definitely still beneficial.