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How to fix non-crawlable pages affected by CSS modals?
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I stumbled across something new when doing a site audit in SEMRUSH today ---> Modals.
The case: Several pages could not be crawled because of (modal:) in the URL.
What I know: "A modal is a dialog box/popup window that is displayed on top of the current page" based on CSS and JS.
What I don't know: How to prevent crawlers from finding them.
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Hi Dan-Louis – all depends on what content these modals are serving, and how your modals are being served.
- Have you checked to make sure that some resource your modals rely on isn't blocked in /robots.txt (you can also plug a URL with a modal into Search Console's robots.txt checker)? What about meta robots noindex?
- On mobile, do you have pop ups that are obscuring content on the page?
- Have you checked any pages with these pop ups/modals in Search Console's fetch and render tool? What resources, if any, are blocked?
TBH I don't like relying on SEMRush (or any singular SEO tool for that matter) for ID'ing technical SEO problems. When was the last time you performed a tech audit?
Keep me posted on what you uncover...
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