Are Accordions Bad for SEO?

The Short Answer, and What This Page Hands Away

No. Words inside an accordion get indexed the same as words in the open. Google has been clear for years. Then mobile-first indexing settled the rest, since a phone hides most of any page behind a scroll.

So the technical half is finished. Whether collapsed text gets discounted. Tabs, and whether they differ. How to build one without a script. None of that gets repeated here.

Almost nobody asks about the other half.

A Crawler Gets All of It. Your Reader Gets the Headings.

Take anything else on a page. A crawler reads your opening line. So does whoever lands there. Paragraph nine the same, then anybody scrolling that far.

Same words. The same order, too. One page.

Now add an accordion. The crawler still receives every word, since all of it sits in your HTML. That is why the indexing question is dull.

Meanwhile your visitor receives something else. A run of headings. Then whatever they opened.

So the page a machine reads and the page a person reads are no longer the same length. One of those you wrote on purpose. The other is whatever got opened.

Every Rule You Know Was Written for the Whole of It

Answer the question early. Only early in which one? Do not bury the important part. An accordion buries whatever you hand it. Is this page long enough? Or too long?

Both answers are correct now. Your reader meets a short page. A crawler meets a long one. Neither is wrong about what arrived.

Nothing about that is a trick. It is simply a page with no single length. Every instruction you have read assumed there was one.

The Accordion Took Away the Thing Doing Your Editing

Here is where it costs something.

A page has a length. Length forces a decision. Something has to come out. Somebody reads eleven sections, then cuts three. Uncomfortable, and the page is better afterwards.

An accordion removes that pressure. Nothing has to be cut now. Any section can sit behind a heading, costing a reader nothing on the way past.

So the accordion did not hide your content. Rather it permitted it.

Then look at what gets permitted. The section somebody wanted in. A paragraph written for one client who asked once. Whatever nobody could defend, and nobody had to, since surviving became free.

Every one is still on your page. All of it still being read by something.

So Your Headings Became the Page

Watch what a reader holds while everything sits shut.

Eight headings. Perhaps ten. Nothing else.

That is the whole page for anybody who opens nothing. Which means your headings stopped being signposts. They are the content now, and every decision comes off them.

Then go and read yours. Accordion headings tend to get written as labels rather than answers. Warranty. Sizing information. Delivery times. Each names a subject and settles nothing.

A label tells somebody where a thing is. Answering was never its job.

Somebody Will Say the Reader Chooses

Which is the pitch, and a fair one. Hardly anybody wades through what they never wanted. The reader picks.

Only look at what picking asks of them. Somebody reads your headings, works out which holds the answer, then acts on the guess. Which is the job your page was there to do.

So the choosing never went away. Instead it moved, off whoever wrote the page and onto whoever landed on it. They decide with less information than you had.

Somebody Will Point at the Phone

On a small screen everything sits behind a scroll anyway. An accordion changes little there. Worth taking seriously.

Then notice what it concedes. The argument was never about what fits on a screen at once.

Scrolling past a paragraph still puts it in front of somebody. They can ignore it, and plenty do. A shut section hands them nothing to ignore. One needs no decision. Meanwhile the other needs one.

Somebody Will Say Their Accordion Loads on Open

Some do. That kind fetches its words on click. Nothing sits in the file until then. A crawler can miss it entirely.

Fair enough, and a different object. Whatever fetches on open is a loading question rather than an accordion one, answered elsewhere here.

The ordinary sort ships every word in the file. A click changes nothing about what sat there.

What an Accordion Is Genuinely Good For

Plenty, and the case is strong. Some content a few readers need while most never will. A specification table. Warranty terms. Unusual shipping.

Putting that behind a heading serves both at once. Whoever needs it finds it. Everybody else gets a page they can read through.

Then there is the gift underneath. A crawler receives all of it regardless. So you get to be complete without being exhausting. Almost nothing else lets you have both.

Nothing above argues for taking your accordions out.

Where the Accordion Argument Stops

No penalty attaches to any of this. No rule forbids an accordion. Search engines have handled them for years.

Nor is any of this a claim about how Google ranks a collapsed section against an open one. Nobody outside Google can settle that, so this page will not pretend to.

The claim is narrower than it sounds. Your page arrives at two lengths. Only the long one got edited.

Some accordions sit outside all of it as well. A table of product dimensions was never going to be read in sequence. Nothing is buried there. None of it was going to be read straight through.

Read Your Own Page With Everything Shut

Open the page you most want found. Then touch nothing.

Read only what shows. The heading, the opening lines, whatever sits outside the collapsed sections. Now put one question to it.

Does this answer what somebody typed into Google?

Should it answer them, your accordion is doing the job it should. It holds the extra rather than the answer. Go and worry about something else.

Should it not, your search visitor lands on a page saying almost nothing until they act. Everything they came for is right there. It also sits behind a label.

No statistic about other people’s websites settles which of those you have. Yours is one page away.

Content Work at SEO Company To-The-TOP! in Calgary

That tidy, collapsed page turns up often enough. Somebody built it to keep things orderly, which it does.

To-The-TOP! has been doing this work in Calgary since 2007. Solo, so whoever reads your page writes the next one. No guarantees. Positions move across three to six months, sometimes longer.

Much of a first pass goes on reading a website the way a stranger meets one. Search engine optimization starts there rather than a settings screen. Then keyword research tells you what somebody typed. Meanwhile the shut page tells you what they got.

Businesses across Calgary bring To-The-TOP! a website and a fair question about where the traffic went. The portfolio shows the keywords this work reached. A Google Ads campaign covers the gap while the slow half lands.

Common Questions About Accordions and SEO

Does Google index content inside an accordion?

Yes. Those words sit in your HTML whether the section is open or shut, and that is what gets read. It rarely gets argued now.

Should I put my main answer inside an accordion?

Rarely. Somebody arriving from a search came for that answer. Making them open something asks for a decision before you have given them a reason.

Are tabs treated the same way as accordions?

For indexing, broadly yes, since the words sit in the file either way. Your reader meets them the same way. Something has to be clicked before the content shows.

Do accordions hurt my page speed?

Usually not. In an ordinary accordion the content already downloaded, so opening a section reveals what sat there. Whatever slows a page tends to be its weight rather than its widgets.

Is an FAQ accordion a problem?

No, and it is one of the better uses. Questions are exactly what a reader wants to pick between. Whether anybody actually asks the ones inside it is a separate matter, answered elsewhere here.