Tab Content Script (v 2.2) Search Engine Friendly?

[stuckagain]

1) Script Title: Tab Content Script (v 2.2)

2) Script URL (on DD): http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamici...abcontent.htm#

3) Describe problem: when disabling javascript to emulate a search spider the collapsed divs do not display. in fact none of the content displays.

They are correctly displayed in this similar script:
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamici...tchcontent.htm

Am I missing something here?

thanks

stuckagain

[stuckagain]

Did a quick google search and came up with this from google's own matt cutts:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mi...wise-comments/

This script needs its description changed or needs to be fixed.

[ddadmin]

I don't see anywhere in that brief blog post that says scripts like Tab Content that use CSS to hide content makes that content SEO unfriendly. Furthermore, Google has advanced a lot since 2005, when that blog post was put up. The general consensus these days is that as long as the content physically exists in the page's markup- that is, when you view source- you see it- Google sees it too and will crawl it.

[stuckagain]

Maybe i'm slow but hidden text is hidden text . . .

Would you risk 100's or 1000's of web development expenses and possible revenue losses on something that has been explicitly been deemed blackhat by google's top search spam expert- even if it was 2005?

Scroll down further on the blog, its explained in more detail.

thanks for your reply, hope the cookie issue explained in post

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/forums/s...ad.php?t=63039

is fixed/changed so that we can use that script instead.

regards
stuckagain

[ddadmin]

Using CSS to dynamically hide/show content forms the basis of dynamic content on the web these days, and is as ubiquitous as it gets. If Google is penalizing sites that merely use CSS to hide legitimate content to be shown later, the affected list of sites would be so massive and the outcry so loud I doubt I would have not heard about them by now. The fact is, some sites do use CSS for black hat SEO purposes- I have to believe what Google is doing is analyzing the context of the content in question plus a whole lot of other factors to arrive at a judgment on whether the webmaster is up to no good. But in general to say using CSS to hide content- as is the case with Tab Content Script- is bad for SEO has absolutely no basis in reality IMHO.