Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Google and Product Description Tabs
-
How does Google process a product page with description tabs? For example, lets say the product page has a tab for Overview, Specifications, What's In the Box and so on.
Wouldn't that content be better served in one main product description tab with the tab names used as (htags) or highlighted paragraph separators?
Or, does all that content get crawled as a single page regardless of the tabs?
-
Just to add on to Mike's response, it depends on how the description tabs are created. If each tab is created on a different page, then naturally Google will treat it as separate pages. However, if all the tabs are created on the same page, but CSS/AJAX is used to display each tab separately, then Google will still consider all the tabs to come from the same page.
Besides Googling, you can also check the page source code. If the content in all the tabs appear in the source code, they will all be crawled as a single page.
-
It may depend on how the tabs are set up. If you can see it in the page source without any problem then usually Google can too. Quick test to check: Grab a chunk of content, copy/paste it into Google search with quotes around it and see if your page comes up. If it did... then yes, Google read it perfectly fine. If not then you need to check how your tabs are hiding the content and fix it.
Two of the ecommerce sites I work on handle content on product pages using tabs to separate specifications, description, accessories and so on. Google can see all of our stuff perfectly fine as one page.
-
From my experience , the content would be better served in one main product description tab - as you thought it may.
Hope that helps

Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How does product category description affect SEO?
Hi - we are a website that sells tours. We have category pages that list the tours in that category (by city, by length of time, theme, etc). At the top of each category page, before the buttons linking to the tours, there is a category description. It is a pretty long paragraph. We are redesigning the website and think it would look nicer to show 2-3 lines of text and then have a down arrow and 'read' more so people can click and it would expand to show the full category description if they want to read it and it won't take up so much room that way. My question is - will this affect SEA at all? Or because the text is still there, just hidden, it won't do anything? Our site ranks very high in organic searches on google and we do not want to do anything that will hurt SEO. thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shirapn0 -
Is possible to submit a XML sitemap to Google without using Google Search Console?
We have a client that will not grant us access to their Google Search Console (don't ask us why). Is there anyway possible to submit a XML sitemap to Google without using GSC? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Inactive Products - Inactive URLs
Hi, In our website www.viatrading.com we have many products that might be in stock or not depending on availability. Until now, when a product was not available anymore, we took this page down (and redirected to its product category page). And, only if the product was available again, we re-activated the URL - this might be days, months or even years later. To make this more SEO-friendly, we decided now that while a product is not available, instead or deactivating/redirecting the page, we will leave it online and just add a message saying "This product is currently not available". If we do this, we will automatically re-activate about 500 products pages at once. 1. Just to make sure, is it harmful for SEO to keep activating/deactivating URLs this way? 2. Since most of these pages have been deindexed for a long time due to being redirected - have they lost all their SEO juice? 3. How can we better activate these old 500 pages - is it ok activating them all at once? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading11 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
Prevent Google from crawling Ajax
With Google figuring out how to make Ajax and JS more searchable/indexable, I am curious on thoughts or techniques to prevent this. Here's my Situation, we have a page that we do not ever want to be indexed/crawled or other. Currently we have the nofollow/noindex command, but due to technical changes for our site the method in which this information is being implemented if it is ever displayed it will not have the ability to block the content from search. It is also the decision of the business to not list the file in robots.txt due to the sensitivity of the content. Basically, this content doesn't exist unless something super important happens, and even if something super important happens, we do not want Google to know of its existence. Since the Dev team is planning on using Ajax/JS to pull in this content if the business turns it on, the concern is that it will be on the homepage and Google could index it. So the questions that I was asked; if Google can/does index, how long would that piece of content potentially appear in the SERPs? Can we block Google from caring about and indexing this section of content on the homepage? Sorry for the vagueness of this question, it's very sensitive in nature and I am trying to avoid too many specifics. I am able to discuss this in a more private way if necessary. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn_Huber0 -
How to deal with URLs and tabbed content
Hi All, We're currently redesigning a website for a new home developer and we're trying to figure out the best way to deal with tabbed content in the URL structure. The design of the site at the moment will have a page for a development and within that you can select your house type, then when on the house type page there will be tabs displayed for the user to see things like the plot map, availability and pricing, specifications, etc. The way our development team are looking at handling this is for the URL to use a hashtag or a query string at the end of it so we can still land users on these specific tabs for PPC for example. My question is really, has anyone had any experience with this? Any recommendations on how to best display the urls for SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Why am I not ranking in Google, but I am in Yahoo and Bing?
The website in question is: www.stbarthexclusives.com Our keywords are currently ranking for both Bing and Yahoo, but we're not appearing anywhere on Google. The website is being crawled successfully, but we still don't have any results. I hoping somebody can point me in the general right direction to fix/correct this problem. Additionally, there's a decent amount of "rel=canonical tags" on the website. If that helps your evaluation. Any advice would be greatly appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Endora0 -
How to prevent Google from crawling our product filter?
Hi All, We have a crawler problem on one of our sites www.sneakerskoopjeonline.nl. On this site, visitors can specify criteria to filter available products. These filters are passed as http/get arguments. The number of possible filter urls is virtually limitless. In order to prevent duplicate content, or an insane amount of pages in the search indices, our software automatically adds noindex, nofollow and noarchive directives to these filter result pages. However, we’re unable to explain to crawlers (Google in particular) to ignore these urls. We’ve already changed the on page filter html to javascript, hoping this would cause the crawler to ignore it. However, it seems that Googlebot executes the javascript and crawls the generated urls anyway. What can we do to prevent Google from crawling all the filter options? Thanks in advance for the help. Kind regards, Gerwin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | footsteps0