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I am building a site that lists shops. Each shop page has two tabs: shop info and reviews. It's one page, with jQuery hiding/showing the right portion of the content. From a purely SEO point of view, what is the best way to assign URLs to those two tabs?

  1. example.com/shopX/info and example.com/shopX/reviews
  2. example.com/shopX#info and example.com/shopX#reviews
  3. or should I simply have 1 URL example.com/shopX, which shows the shop info, and has the reviews accessible through clicking the 'reviews' tab

I know that up to 2016, Google preferred (1), since content hidden under tabs was not really indexed. Currently, it does index content under tabs, which may imply (1) is punished as the two URLs actually serve the same content - just with a different portion visible - making (3) the better option. Lastly, (2) looks a wee bit uglier, but I'm really considering SEO only :)

What's the proper 2017 answer to this question?

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I would say you should consider the usability aspect greatly.

SEO:

  • The only time you may like to have separate URL for info and review when you would like to monitor the performance of one vs other.
  • In general info and review can sit in the same page and generally you will not have much ranking in separate review page, so i would say keep it in the same page with anchor link.
  • Google does relatively good job reading jQuery content (Hide / Show) etc.

Also, you don't wanna have info page with very limited info and a separate page for review (Load time involved).

So, there is not much issue as far as SEO ins concerned and i would encourage you to think about UI and usability aspect more here.

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  • Concerning usability/UI: I would use the history() function to dynamically change the url as a user navigates from one tab to the other. So there would not be any page load involved when moving from one tab to the other. So to me it really is a SEO-only question. I take from your answer that (3) and (2) are the best options here, to have better ranking for the single 'total' page example.com/shopX?
    – bribble
    Commented Jul 11, 2017 at 7:13
  • The reason i said to consider usability aspect because there is no issue whether you keep tabs in same page or load different URL. Keeping in one would be recommended. Good website structure with better consideration of usability helps SEO and that is why i said you can have either no issue and think about usability.
    – TopQnA
    Commented Jul 11, 2017 at 7:23

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