Are Modal Popups Searchable? via @RyanJones

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Published on January 14, 2020 3:42:57 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXYKm3V0UXk

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Are Modal Popups Searchable?

Editor's note: "Ask an SEO" is a weekly column by technical SEO experts Shelly Fagin, Ryan Jones, Adam Riemer, and Tony Wright. Come up with your hardest SEO question and fill out our form. You might see your answer in the next #AskanSEO post!

This week for Ask An SEO, we have a question from Ashley in Chicago. Ashley asks:

"Are modal popups crawlable? If not, how can the content that's within them become crawlable?'

This is a great question Ashley, and like every SEO question the answer is: "It depends."

Thanks for asking, stay tuned next week for more questions and answers.

Just kidding… let's dive in and take a look at a couple of different scenarios.

Using a modal itself isn't necessarily good or bad for SEO – it's all about how the modal is coded and implemented.

In fact, let's not limit this to modals. The following advice and techniques can also apply to popups, interstitials, and overlays as well.

Implementing Modals

There are two major ways to implement a modal.

Option 1: Include the Content in the Page Itself but Not Make It Visible at First

Typically you would hide it with some .css and then use JavaScript to update that .css to make the modal visible when some action occurs (like a user click).

The technical term you may hear in regard to this is that the modal content is "loaded as part of the DOM."

In this case, the modal will be fully crawlable and indexed as part of the page by search engines.

(We can debate how much weight it will be given, but that's a different question for a different day.)

Option 2: Dynamically Load the Modal Content in After a User Action

This is the "AJAX"-style approach. In this case, the content may not be indexed as part of the page because search engines will not take that user action to trigger it

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