Testing content and page rendering for new website

[jediviper]

Hi guys,

So there is a new website in the making and I would like to test the SEO attributes of the main products pages, as we are planning to use an accordion feature for the main content of such pages.
This means that the content area will be like hidden below the fold and only after you click on the main H1 title (which is visible) the rest of the content will unfold.
My most important concern is to check how this will look to the Googlebot, before we go live.

Currently with a right click->View page source check in Chrome, there is nothing from the text included. Does this mean that also the Googlebot won't find the text?
How can I test these pages for Google which are only live in a testing environment?

[RedBar]

I use accordion on several pages and in my experience Google definitely sees it however does not rank even an exclusive section of text BUT when that text is in Parenthesis, it ranks first.

So, if you are concerned whether or not G will find it, yes it will, however whether anything can actually rank for specific text or keywords or not, I do not know.

I use this accordion on several similar however totally different product pages to give a generic widget description.

[jediviper]

@RedBar
you really think that even if the source code doesn't show the text it can still be found by the Googlebot?

[JesterMagic]

Googlebot is a lot smarter these days and uses javascript to render the page so it can rank the page in it's final form.

What I am not sure about is if Google will link to specific tabs/accordion sections if that content only exist on the one page and is displayed via css/javascript instead of each tab being on another separate page.

What I would do is create an accordion on a page that is not very important on your website just to test how Google handles it in the search results.

[jediviper]

@JesterMagic
The site will go live in a few weeks. Till then I need to know whether we continue with the current format and we prepare our content to be used in all pages with the accordion style or I make an official request for this to change.

If we go live with this feature and then the site gets index and we realise that Google has problems with the content, then it will be too late to make big changes. That's why I would like to make some tests now and make sure that we won't have any serious issues.

[RedBar]

you really think that even if the source code doesn't show the text it can still be found by the Googlebot?

I've just checked mine and it is shown in the source code.

Have you hidden yours?

[NickMNS]

Currently with a right click->View page source check in Chrome, there is nothing from the text included. Does this mean that also the Googlebot won't find the text?

Googlebot will not find the text.

What Jestermagic says is true, but...

Googlebot is a lot smarter these days and uses javascript to render the page so it can rank the page in it's final form.

Yes Googe can and does render JS pages, but rendering does not happen right away, and may not happen at all. You cannot depend on Google to render the page. The way to solve this problem is to pre-render the pages for Googlebot and server those pages when Googlebot comes crawling.

Here is a thread that discusses this issue:
[webmasterworld.com...]

See my post in that thread that links to video from Google I/O that explains the whole process. Note that the video is from 2018 and things have advanced since. I know there is another video but I can't find it.

Here are two more:
[youtube.com...] (jump to 5:09, for the specific question)
[youtube.com...] (jump to 8:12, for the specific question)

Note: apparently you need to have flashy colored hair to be a guest on this video series. I'm off to color my hair...., now if only I had hair to color!

If I find the most recent video I'll post it.

[JesterMagic]

@jediviper thats why I suggest you just test your accordion code on one page on your site that is not to important so you can see how Google modifies the ranking for it.

We can give opinions but they don't really mean much since ranking of content depends a lot on the site signals itself and how it is laid out. Plus there is a million different ways to do an accordion in HTML/CSS/Javascript. Maybe Google likes your way better or maybe some other way. Maybe you use Ajax to pull in content and that will mess things up, who knows. The only real way to find out is test it yourself on your site using a small sample.

I am doing this right now for structured data and rich snippets. My old way was out dated and had to many warnings, so I checked out my competitors and figured out which 2 I liked best (with a few modifications) and right now I have about 6 different pages running different test structured data setups. By the end of next week I will see which one Google likes best and probably go with it for the entire site, or maybe modify the structure a bit and try again for another few weeks until both Google and I are satisfied.

[NickMNS]

Here is a video from Google explaining rendering from 2020.
[youtube.com...]

And from the description of the video is this link, that explains rendering and javascript without a video:
[developers.google.com...]

[jediviper]

Thanks for the replies guys, but till the website goes live, I can't check many things in the real environment, so I am just trying to prepare all elements in any way possible.

BTW our main dev guy replied with this:
-> it’s a single page app, the "view source" won’t provide the present state of the source, but Google is JS aware and should handle it fine.

So according to his opinion the text should be crawl-able.
It all remains to be seen when we go live.

[not2easy]

Google is JS aware and should handle it fine.

Google has been able to parse and render javascript and JQuery to determine content for quite a long while now. The thing to check before going live is that you are not hiding any of those resources from Google in robots.txt. If the scripts are in a folder that is blocked in robots.txt. make sure that any .js files have been added as 'Allow' entries.

For example, if your robots.txt file lists

Disallow: /scripts/

Be sure it is followed with

Allow: /*.js

[NickMNS]

Google is JS aware and should handle it fine.

No, only if you are willing to wait. As I mentioned above, rendering is not immediate and it may not happen at all. To be sure you need provide for server side pre-rendering for Googlebot.

I would strongly recommend that you send a link of the videos that I included in my posts to your dev, the process is fully explained, and then you can make a fully informed decision on the best way to proceed.

[jediviper]

@not2easy
Valid point, will make sure to include the Allow command.

@NickMNS
I will send to the dev the info that you have provided and I hope he will keep that in mind to avoid any surprises when the site goes live.

Thank you guys. ;)