Experiment With Tabbed Content

[tabswrap] [tabhead id=”1″] Instructions[/tabhead] [tabhead_last id=”2″] Content [/tabhead_last] [tab id=”1″] This page is part of an experiment designed to test Google’s ability to handle tabbed content. To proceed please click here.[/tab][tab id=”2″]

tabs

In one of our recent articles we covered an issue of content which is not immediately available on the page (such as tabs, div popups, accordion expanders…etc) and how Google may treat these. The basic issue is that when users search for a term “Dejan Tested Tabbed Content” they will find this page but will not be switched to the right tab automatically thus confusing users.

Here we’re trying to ascertain whether Google is capable of offering users a SERP snippet shortcut to the exact tab containing the keyword matching user query.

An example is available here:

Chris snippet

The above result is triggered when you  search Google for “Dejan SEO” within the above site, try it. It’s clear that Google managed to somehow track what people do (I highly doubt it was links to the #anchor). Our best guess is Chrome and toolbar.

So if they figured out that most people jump to the #start anchor point they can figure out how to switch to the right tab, given that tabs were also implemented like they are on this page.

Please help this experiment by searching for “Dejan Tested Tabbed Content” and jumping to this tab.

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Dan Petrovic, the managing director of DEJAN, is Australia’s best-known name in the field of search engine optimisation. Dan is a web author, innovator and a highly regarded search industry event speaker.
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6886-3211

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4 thoughts on “Experiment With Tabbed Content”

  1. Saijo George says:

    Interesting, I havent seen the inline jump in SERPs before . It would be nice nice to figure out how to trigger those.

  2. David Sewell says:

    I believe the clear anchor is used. Jump to has been around for years, but few SEOs bother to optimise for this snippet. Search for “freshwater frisbee” to see my own experiment.

  3. Guest says:

    We are using tabbed content on a number of our pages but everything comes back to the main page in the SERPS without the tab. This page just was put up on the site within the last month and it has not really been though the SEO process. Simple searches such as What is VisionLink that should bring up a tab or others are coming up fairly high in the SERPS but take you to the main page. While it does give you more content to work with and serves up smaller chunks for UX taking them to the tab from the SERP would be my choice too. We are currently tracking the keyword they come in on and then looking at events placed on each tab to judge engagement. From the results I am see in GA it doesn’t look like some users are getting to the content they originally searched for.
    This woks for now but I am really interested in this experiment to get visitors to the right content and trigger the tab from the SERP.

  4. Kevin says:

    I’d be interested in the results of a similar test, omitting the CSS selector reference to “btnNext.png”. I don’t have anything to back this, but I have an hunch that there’s a more SEO-friendly implementation, at least when using the same library multiple times on the same domain (different products in a catalogue, for instance).
    If I’m not mistaken, doesn’t using the CSS selector to create the element mean aborting the document’s HTMLParagraphElement chain? (Back to DOM Level 0, in other words – along with all the other domain-level instances of this class?) Would it not be better to create the new element in the existing ‘p’ element chain if so?