Plugin Contributor
Tracy Levesque
(@liljimmi)
🏳️🌈 YIKES, Inc. Co-Owner
Hi @planetayurveda
Are you referring to search engines like Google or the WordPress and WooCommerce search? If you’re referring to WordPress and WooCommerce that is a pro feature of the plugin.
Thank you.
-Tracy
I am referring to search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo.
If I search on any content from custom tabs it will never show up in search engines.
Plugin Contributor
Tracy Levesque
(@liljimmi)
🏳️🌈 YIKES, Inc. Co-Owner
Hi @planetayurveda
Thank you for clarifying. It looked into it and Google treats hidden content differently than content that displays on the page without further user action.
https://edgy.app/how-does-google-view-hidden-content
To summarize, it seems that Google does not treat content that is concealed behind tabs, accordions, or any other mechanism where JavaScript is used to reveal content, the same way as content that is clearly visible by default.
For example, if a reader has to click ‘read more’ to view the rest of a blog post or article, any keyword optimized text will not have as much power as the content that was visible by default.
Any content that comes after the ‘read-more’ button does not carry the same weight as what came before. In other words, if it’s not immediately apparent to visitors, Google deems it as less important.
What adds an additional layer to our understanding is that hidden content will, however, be indexed by Google.
This means that pages may rank for search terms or phrases that are related to the content that appears in hidden sections.
While ‘hidden content’ is not treated equally, you could say it still holds some value when it comes to ranking.
So while it does index it, it gives it less weight.
I hope that’s helpful!
Thank you.
-Tracy
Not that it makes me happy, but the explanation is helpful!
But the strange part is that I can’t find the information from the custom tab on google at all, not even with site:planetayurveda.nl in the query. It is non-existent. And the other strange part is that the info from the default Woocommerce product tabs does show up in Google.
Maybe Google et al index it for ranking purposes, but never to show it up anywhere in a search query.
Now because of that, I am in the progress of re-writng all my product information to have all info available on google and thus also on the main page of the product. When done it will actually make the custom tab obsolete, with which I am not happy, since the tabs make the information more organized for which I started using it in the first place.
