: Will using tabs with JavaScript (jQuery) hurt my SEO because of crawlability? I have a page with tabs like this: http://www.problemio.com/problems/problem.php?problem_id=180 See how there are 3 tabs?

@Murray155

Yes it will probably hurt your SEO, if you are only using javascript to structure your site's content.

Edit: the javascript wont hurt your SEO, but you have to be carefull not to neglect the proper use of HTML for structuring your website.

To get a good idea of what search engines are indexing I always turn off CSS and javascript and see what I end up with. If the page is still structured and uses proper HTML tags for structuring and dividing I know i'm good.

However, search engines are always finding new and better ways to index your pages and rank the content. I wouldn't be suprised, like paulmorriss pointed out, that they are looking into interacting with javascript to see if there is more content to index. This holds especially for sites that use asynchronous javascript (ajax) to load external content into the page.

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@Candy875

Search engines don't generally run javascript when they crawl a page, so they will see the full text when they load the page. (Google is experimenting with running some javascript, but we don't know much about that.)

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@Pope3001725

This is fine. Since the content is available on the page when the page loads all search engines bots can find and index that content.

FYI, if you are going to also make that content available without JavaScript, which is good accessibility, make sure you use canonical URLs so you don't have duplicate content issues since multiple URLs will load the same content.

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