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I have pages that will be crawled by the google and bing crawlers. One of the pages uses twitter bootstrap 2.3.2 Tabbable nav:

<div class="tabbable"> 
  <ul class="nav nav-tabs">
    <li class="active"><a href="#tab1" data-toggle="tab">Section 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="#tab2" data-toggle="tab">Section 2</a></li>
  </ul>
  <div class="tab-content">
    <div class="tab-pane active" id="tab1">
      <p>I'm in Section 1</p>
    </div>
    <div class="tab-pane" id="tab2">
      <p>Howdy, I'm in Section 2 and not currently visible.  Will search engines ignore me?</p>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

Since the content on the non active tabs is hidden I could see the search engines applying a significant penalty or discounting that content entirely when they crawl the site--not good news for the tabs since they will need to be removed.

In this link google warns about hiding text. and Matt Cutts says "I don’t recommend that people use CSS to hide text" so clearly you can get penalized for hiding text. However, engines may be smart enough to distinguish valid and invalid hiding.

Is my concern on hidden tabs warranted or do the search engines distinguish?

JStark
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  • can you please evaluate my answer? I've edited it in the past days with the references you were asking. – Olèp Oct 21 '13 at 09:11

1 Answers1

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Googlebot crawler takes since last year js and css as stated by Matt Cutts in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9BWbruCiDc

To answer your question there is a fresh Matt Cutts video here youtube.com/watch?v=EsW8E4dOtR. What he says is that if you use js or css to hide content in a non-spammish way google will not take action against it and will consider your content just like any other content on your site.

Olèp
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    Thanks Olèp, I updated my question with a quote from Matt Cutts which seems to indicate the opposite of what you are proposing. Do you have any supporting documentation from SEO experts to make your case? – JStark Oct 03 '13 at 16:15
  • @JStark, that's a 2005 link. SEO, web and Google evolved. In doing SEO nowadays the main question you should answer when you ask the quesiton "is SEO well done ont his site?" is infact "is this a good site for visitors? is the code well written? does it have errors?". Anyway to answer to your question there is a fresh Matt Cutts video here supporting my opinion [link]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsW8E4dOtRY[/link]. It would be insane for Google to point all the modern web site as spammer... – Olèp Oct 03 '13 at 17:48
  • Hi @Olep, thanks for the link. It does clear up my question. My main objection to your original response was the section about google not taking CSS into consideration--they clearly do. If you agree to my edits I'll accept this answer. – JStark Oct 21 '13 at 22:04
  • @JStark you are right. I had old infos about js and css crawling. actually googlebot crawls the js and css (what he dows with it is not so clear anyway). I've updated my answer with Cutts' video on this issue. – Olèp Oct 22 '13 at 08:58