If you do SEO for the vast variety of niches, industries, and website designs more likely than not you come across plenty of ‘what ifs’ and ‘buts’. And then, if you are the curious type, you test to check whether your assumptions are correct.
Well, we are definitely the ‘curious types’. And one of these ‘what ifs’ was whether ‘hidden content’ or the content displayed under ‘read more’, accordion sections and tabs could leverage the same results on SERP as visible and open content on the page.
We have been noticing, along with other SEO specialists, that hidden content does not perform as well as visible content and does not deliver the same impact on rankings. But these were just our assumptions. We needed solid (or at least close) proof that our assumptions are correct.
How do we get as solid proof as we can? Yes, you got it: the experiment.
We have run an experiment over the course of three months to confirm our observations. Although for the most part the experiment was conducted both for our own reference and that of the clients that get stuck on their way to Top 5 and insist on keeping the content hidden, we thought that those of you who want to see that ‘solid’ proof will find our experiment quite interesting and turned our findings into a blog post.
How Did We Organize Our ‘Hidden Content’ and ‘Rankings’ Experiment?
First things first,
The goal of the hidden content experiment:
To verify the assumption that SEO-optimized ‘hidden content’ displayed in accordions, tabs, ‘read more’ or ‘click-to-expand’ sections performs worse on search engines, is partially devalued and has less impact on rankings than the content visible immediately when the page is loaded.
Experiment Details:
- To make the experiment as accurate as possible we have come up with the random word which has not previously had any mentions on Google and 0 search results
- We have purchased 5 new and ‘clean’ domains with the same name extension. Before purchasing a domain we ensured that the domain had no previous history or backlinks.
- Each participating website pointed to a different IP address
- Every website was built on WordPress using the Divi theme
- The only plugin installed on each of the websites was Yoast SEO
- Unique content was written for each of the websites of approximately the same format and length.
- First, we introduced two websites. After 6 days we introduced the other 3 websites.
- We researched the impact of the hidden content both on homepages and the inner pages with various types of URL structures.
- We tracked the rankings both for desktop and mobile versions of the website.
- Throughout the experiment, we took the effect of various onsite factors into consideration.
The experiment was launched on the 20th of January 2019.
Here is a table with the data for each of the 5 websites:
| Website | Launch Date | Content Type | Ranking page | KW in Title tag | KW in URL |
| Site 1 | 2019-01-20 | Visible | Homepage | No | No |
| Site 2 | 2019-01-20 | Hidden | Homepage | No | No |
| Site 3 | 2019-01-26 | Visible | Inner page | Yes | Yes |
| Site 4 | 2019-01-26 | Hidden | Inner page | Yes | Yes |
| Site 5 | 2019-01-26 | Visible | Inner page | No | No |
20 January 2019
First two sites were launched (Site 1 and Site 2):
All of the three websites were added to different Search Console accounts. However, at first, we indexed Site 4 only via the Search Console. After 10 minutes we checked the rankings:
