One of the most popular trends for displaying content currently is the use of both tabbed content, and expandable content boxes. Both are often used as a means of displaying large amounts of content in a user friendly manner. This beneficial user experience design trend now has one major drawback however, Google’s Jon Mueller has stated that Google may not be crawling and indexing that content.
Barry Schwartz reported early last week murmurings in the webmaster community about this issue and went straight to the source in today’s Webmaster Central hangout. Today, Jon Mueller has confirmed that content displayed in a tabbed or expandable manner may be discounted by Google as it is not displayed to users.
While this goes against what was reported by Matt Cutts July 24, 2013:
Mueller states:
From our point of view, it’s always a tricky problem when we send a user to a page where we know this content is actually hidden. Because the user will see perhaps the content in the snippet, they’ll click through the page, and say, well, I don’t see where this information is on this page. I feel kind of almost misled to click on this to actually get in there.
Sorry user interface aficionados, it’s looks as though if you want 100% assurance that you content is being indexed and crawled by Goolge, you’re going to have to go back to prominently displaying all page content.