Does Google Index Click To Expand Hidden Content?

This question has been floating around in the online world for quite a while now and most people were just guessing at what the answer was. However last month John from SEO Roundtable spoke with John Muller in Google and he shed a little bit more light on Google’s way of thinking towards this.

Google have changed their view on search quite a lot in recent years and as you all know there has been a huge shift towards content. This has led to a problem for designers, they now have a lot more content to fit onto the same size page. Although longer homepages now exist, e-commerce designers are still having the same problem in terms of fitting in product information onto a single product page. This has led to the majority of designers using click to expand tabs to hide content whilst still making it available to the user. Note: If you don’t understand what ‘Click to Expand’ is see the examples at the bottom of the page!

Users Point Of View

Google now look at things from the users point of view and index content based on the user, now they feel that if the content is hidden from the user then they should not count this hidden content.

We feel that this might not necessarily be fair however it makes sense, why would you hide valuable information from the user? Google feels like the user is being mislead, the user might have seen this hidden content in a snippet and then when they navigate to the page they don’t see the content straight away.

John Muller said is his interview that Google will “Actively Ignore” the hidden content. He also makes a good point stating:

“So if you want that content really indexed, I’d make sure it’s visible for the users when they go to that page.”

To be honest we agree with John that you should have all your important content on the page for the user to see, remember that if you are keeping the user happy then Google should follow suit.

Side Note
We also conducted a small bit on research into this ourselves (nothing 100% definitive), and on some brochure websites with Click To Expand FAQ’s, we noticed that the hidden content actually does get indexed and that content ranks on Google. However we also noticed that on some e-commerce websites the product descriptions within hidden tabs are not being indexed at all.

In conclusion we would advise that you to make sure that any important information (content) is there for all to see!

If you feel that your website might have an abundance of unindexed hidden content then get in touch, with the contact form below, and we will do our best to help you out.

E-Commerce Example Of Click To Expand Content