I read an article on my iPad last week and was interesting with several website developers saying that when they placed content in a Modal to keep the website clean that the text in the Modal had a huge impact on SEO vs having the text/content on the page of the website itself and when they placed it back, google then picked it up again.
So I looked at website I made for a client which is due for a revamp and they have lots of modals and one thing I noticed is the when I copy some of the text from a page of a website and copy into google = this pics up well in google (top of the search) but when I copy text from a Modal then nothing at all.
So is placing key content for SEO in a Modal bad practice?
Didn’t look anymore into it really, I skimmed through a few articles saying its ok…some saying bad…
Just wondered when I read it briefly and I am sure it mentioned something like to use SEO friendly Modals, what ever that means ?
But when I checked a site I built the next day and copied some page text into google, it was found and top straight away. But most of the Modal text didn’t even pick up in google (from the first and second pages)
I thought I would post it here when I remembered see if this has effected anyone on here.
Would the same apply for putting text into an Accordion too…as its hidden?
As a general rule, if you don’t think a piece of content is important enough to make easily accessible to your website visitors, search engines like Google are unlikely to consider it important either. This is because search engines are trying to evaluate website content in a way that’s similar to how humans evaluate it. In other words, they’re looking to provide the best user experience possible, which means surfacing content that’s relevant and valuable to the user without requiring them to dig too deep into the website. So, when creating or optimizing content for your website, it’s important to consider both its relevance to the user and its ease of accessibility in order to improve your website’s search engine optimization.
Is the text there but just hidden with css until the modal is invoked? Then search engines crawl it but it’ll perhaps have a little less weight over visible content.
Now if the modal only loads the text once it’s invoked using Ajax, then, no, it’s not indexed.
What I have done is used the Modal for pop up small text etc more important content needed to help SEO will be on the page for now.
I used it quite heavy on a couple of websites where it needed the content to be crawled. But I am redesigning this site as we use it for live streaming too.
Yeah - I spoke to a company who do SEO for 2 leading brands and they said the same thing, I am now not using modals as much because of this - but using them videos, pop up small text and basic things.
