The other day, I covered a thread around click to expand content not being indexed or ranked by Google. So I decided to ask John Mueller of Google that question in a live hangout on Google+ about a week ago and I was a bit surprised by his response.

In short, he said content within “click to expand” menus or “tabs” may be “discounted” since Google knows you are hiding it from users. Google may not rank the page for the content within those sections because Google knows users do not see the content by default.

Here are two examples of tabbed content from major e-commerce sites, B&H Photo and AJ Madison:

Seems like Google is saying the content within these tabs will be discounted.

Amazon use to use a lot of tabs but now they seem to output most of the content directly on the page, making the user scroll and scroll to see the content.

Google’s own help documents does use click to expand but only to see the questions. Clicking on a question itself does bring the user to a new page, with the answer listed, as opposed to the answer beneath the question – as you may see in click to expand content:

John answered this question at 10 minutes and 55 seconds into the video:

Here is the transcript:

John never did get back to me.

Forum discussion at Google+.