Hi I need to design a product detail page, and have been looking around for inspiration. A lot of sites seem to use the tabbed interface approach like this http://www.dixons.co.uk/martprd/product/seo/639047 But do you think this tabbed approach helps or hinders the search ranking of a page as it seems very popular recently?
It depends how you set it up. It could be risky if you have the inactive tabs as invisible, but indexable. Google et al. might think you are hiding it on purpose. If you have the tabs' info show on a page reload with some variable in the URL, it won't be perceived as hiding but then it's not as smooth a user experience. It's one of those cases where you ca get done in for something totally legit. Maybe if you set it up in some AJAXy way where the text doesn't show in the source if it doesn't show in the browser, you'll be OK. Then, for SEO purposes, make sure the text is indexable on its own URL separately so you don't miss out feeding valuable content.
My choice would be to use javascript & AJAX to make a tabbed interface (like T0PS said). Then you can make use of the <noscript> tag to create search engine indexable content either on the same page or linking to different urls.