Best practice for expandable content

[Alexogilvie]

We are in the middle of having new pages added to our website. On our website we will have a information section containing various details about a product, this information will be several paragraphs long. we were wanting to show the first paragraph and have a read more button to show the rest of the content that is hidden.

Whats googles view on this, is this bad for seo?

[rikano]

Hi,

Google has no problem with collapsable Div's elements that are crawlable. I mean if the bot can see and read the content in the collapsable div, there is no issue with that. I have used this 100's of times and never had ranking issues + in the text-only version of google cache, i see the whole content.

So, use some css + onclick njs function and u're good to go. Here is a sample hidden content in a collapsabel div , that is totally legimate: derniereminute.net  , you can check this screenshot for more details: http://awesomescreenshot.com/08c2ie9rff

If you need more help, let me know

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Reece,

A lot of sites do this and I think it is pretty much common place these days. All you have to remember is that the important information that you want Google to see, should be the paragraph that is shown on load.

Just remember though, that the more you hide, the less that Google is likely to see the page as an authority if all they are left with is just a single paragraph.

That said, build the page for visitors rather than search engines and make it as user friendly as you can.

-Andy