Plugin Contributor
Tracy Levesque
(@liljimmi)
🏳️🌈 YIKES, Inc. Co-Owner
Hi @stefancp
Short answer: Yes, tab content is indexed by Google.
Longer answer: Freddie goes into more detail on this ticket: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/yoast-doesnt-recognise-content-in-tabs-part-2/
Thank you!
-Tracy
Thanks Tracy, reading details now.
Small note, I don’t care if Yoast sees it as search engine friendly or not. I am interested if the tabbed content is indexed in Search Engines like the main page, or if it isn’t.
If the main page is indexed and words appear in searches and the tabs content does not, it means Google doesn’t see it properly.
Question, can you please give me a website that uses the tabs to check how Google indexed the content?
Thanks.
-
This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by
StefanCP.
Also I don’t understand why was this marked as solved, when I haven’t asked for Yoast issues.
For example, take this page that uses tabs:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/yikes-inc-easy-custom-woocommerce-product-tabs/#developers
It’s not your tabs plugin, it’s wordpress.org.
But, while “https://wordpress.org/plugins/yikes-inc-easy-custom-woocommerce-product-tabs/” content is indexed properly and appears in Search engines, “https://wordpress.org/plugins/yikes-inc-easy-custom-woocommerce-product-tabs/#reviews”, “#development”, don’t. And this is true for all pages on wordpress.org, their tabs are bad for SEO.
So that means that all the information I’d add in tabs would be a waste of time, because people looking to solve their health issues that are described in tabs will not find my pages when searching google.
That’s what I asked, not if Yoast works, if some page tester gives my page good ratings, etc.
Plugin Contributor
Tracy Levesque
(@liljimmi)
🏳️🌈 YIKES, Inc. Co-Owner
Hi Stefan,
It’s marked as solved, because Freddie had a pretty lengthy reply to your question in the other thread and I provided a short one. 🙂
I’ll paste it here as well.
Freddie
(@fmixell)
1 week, 5 days ago
@danzmwl,
I’m looking into this now but I just wanted to throw it out there that this won’t prevent Google from seeing the content and crawling it correctly. I’m going to attach some support articles that could help you evaluate your pages SEO standing with Google in the meantime.
SEO Starter Guide (From Google itself):
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en
Google Page Speed Insights:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Google Lighthouse
https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse
If you have the Google Chrome browser you can navigate to any page on your website and receive an instant SEO score for your page. To do this you would do the following.
– Navigate to page you want to check.
– Right click anywhere, choose “Inspect”
– Click the “Audits” tab.
– Choose “SEO” under Audits section.
– Click “Run audits”
This is a much more accurate representation of how Google views your page because it is coming directly from Google.
Also, I recommend using the other audits like “Performance” with Throttling enabled. This is much more important to search engines than meta tags and whatever else falls into the realm of SEO. If your site is scoring poorly for slower internet connections you’ll likely be penalized by all search engines because your site is not accessible to people with slow internet connections. If you notice when you search for anything in Google the top results 99% of the time will load almost instantly because they pay attention to page speed.
I hope this helps while you wait for this to be resolved!
Cheers,
Freddie
Plugin Contributor
Tracy Levesque
(@liljimmi)
🏳️🌈 YIKES, Inc. Co-Owner
I also reopened the ticket and I’ll let Freddie answer your follow up questions.
Thank you,
-Tracy
Also, if content on tabs is not indexed in Search Engines this should be investigated and fixed, else the customers should be warned because if you throw a lot of important information on tabs that aren’t indexed by Google you are basically both wasting resources creating the content and losing customers that look in the engines for what you are delivering.
Audits are worthless in this instance, don’t take offence. We need to see indexed tabs. I double tribe quadruple checked tabs on wordpress.org, which of course are not created by you, and their tabs are out of bounds for Google.
If you audit them, whatever the tools tell you the reality is obvious, none are indexed.
If possible, I would like to see any example that uses “Custom Product Tabs for WooCommerce” where the content and tabs are indexed in Google, it’s pretty easy to check. Copy paste some content from the tab, use ” “, and voila, you have it. If the main page has indexed content and the tabs have zero indexed content, that means that the tabs are NOT search engine friendly.
Also, I apologize if my tone is abrasive, I don’t want to insult anybody, I just want to point out issues 🙂 Thank you
@stefancp,
With a little bit of Googling I’ve found an article about tabbed content and yes it is indexed. But it won’t appear in snippets because its not visible on page load.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-index-rank-content-in-accordions-tabs-fully-26379.html
However, we can not help you with seo because we have no control over the output of your tabs.
If you turn off this plugin you will still have tabs in the exact same fashion because your theme is outputting them on the page. We’re simply collecting more data to pass to your theme to place on the page.
That being said it is impossible for us to provide a sweeping update that would make everyone’s tabs indexed by Google as we have no control over the output.
If you have any more questions please contact the developers who have made your theme or the SEO plugin that you’re using. This plugin does not display any tabs on your website.
As one final piece of advice you should look at schema.org for structured markup for your tabbed area and that might solve all your problems.
– Freddie
I see, didn’t know that content doesn’t appear in snippets if it doesn’t appear on page load. Thanks, then this is a no go for me sadly, it would have helped tons, especially on mobile.
@freddie: Here is a way of implementing a tabbed sticky menu that allows quick access both for mobile and desktops/laptops while not affecting the way it’s displayed on search engines:
https://www.emag.ro/televizor-led-smart-lg-108-cm-4k-ultra-hd-43um7450pla/pd/D6R8FQBBM/
Might be a solution for you. In fact I will try to get your plugin and customize it that way when I have time. Tabs are Descriere, Specificatii, Review-uri, etc, on a blue bar.
I searched for tabbed results and everything is fine since all the content is on one page. It’s not pure tabbed content but Search Engines are more important.
The very least you can make this tabbed display option, first option classic, second option one page, sticky tabbed menu.
