Tabbed Content in 2020 - What is current thinking

[IanTurner]

Do we look at changing url - changing url #, changing url querystring or just ignoring the url and leaving all the tabs under an unchanged url.

For instance I have three tabs

Overview, Further Information and Reviews - which of these url schemes do you think is best at the moment

1
www.exmple.com/widget/overview
www.exmple.com/widget/furtherinformation
www.exmple.com/widget/reviews

2
www.exmple.com/widget#overview
www.exmple.com/widget#furtherinformation
www.exmple.com/widget#reviews

3
www.exmple.com/widget?v=overview
www.exmple.com/widget?v=furtherinformation
www.exmple.com/widget?v=reviews

4
www.exmple.com/widget

At the moment I'm thinking of different URLs if I can keep my core information to a minimum and the tab content changes over 50% of the real content of the page, but I'd like to get a second, third and nth opinion on this one.

[JesterMagic]

My thoughts on this has changed over the years and from the look of your example URLs your site is similar to mine.

Do the tabs themselves contain a lot of information?

If they do not, then load all the tabs on the page and use javascript to control them which would mean using URL scheme #2.

If the tabs contain a lot of information then I would load them individually (basically each is its own page) and use URL scheme #4 and making sure each tab had it's own canonical link. For some sites I use to use #1 but I found that to restrictive when you stick category names in the url (as the widget always would be assigned to that category not allowing for a category change (unless you change the url) or multiple categories).

The only downfall to this is you have a lot of content above the tabs that is the same for each tab. This could potentially create a duplicate content issue for Google...

[mack]

I would say have a URL perimeter for the tab so that it is possible to directly link to the page with the correct tab. This would be useful for internal links also where you want the user to see exactly the right content.

It may also be important to minimize the amount of content that falls outwith tabs to prevent possible duplicate content issues.

I would be tempted to use option 3

Mack.