Placing content behind a “read more” or in tabs has become increasingly popular, especially since mobile traffic has become more important. Google has announced that they will treat it like any other text, because it’s good for the user. Unfortunately, that’s not true—yet.
Placing content behind tabs or a read more button is a convenient way to sort different types of information on a page. In the past, Google actively worked against this approach, wanting to see exactly what the visitor sees. In SEO, it has been a handy way to include more content on overcrowded pages, and Google has viewed that as abuse.
Eventually, Google had to back down and admit that, at least for mobile users, it was unreasonable to expect them to scroll through long blocks of text. They then announced that they would handle “click to expand” differently. According to Gary Illyes, it was now okay to place content in such a manner. The problem is that it’s not true.
We Ran a Simple Test
As you know, we at Brath believe in testing things. So we thought it was time to test this since we felt it sounded a bit doubtful. It could be that Illyes means that in the future it will work the way he says, but the statement is from November, and today we can still show that it’s not necessarily true.
We simply took our page that ranks for “search engine optimization” and placed content behind some tabs. Below you can see an image of how it looks in the code:
And what the page looks like for visitors:
And what does it look like in Google’s cache then?
Note that the text is not included in Google’s text cache. It simply isn’t in the index. Take a look at our page yourself and you’ll see it clearly, but do it quickly—this is an important page, and while testing is fun, we will revert the changes.
Does Google Want More Than It Can Handle?
It is extremely rare for Google to say something that is outright incorrect. Often you get something vague, often smoke and mirrors, but rarely something that is blatantly wrong. This simply isn’t true, and it makes me wonder whether Google actually tried to solve this but failed.
Magnus Bråth
Consultant & Adviser
Magnus is one of the world's most prominent search marketing specialists and primarily works with management and strategy at his agency Brath AB.