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    Lightboxes and SEO

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • Chris8198
      Chris8198 last edited by

      Do lightboxes (AKA popup boxes when you click "learn more" type CTAs) have any negative effect on SEO? We are looking at revamping our sites to have more of a tiled approach, and a lightbox with summary content popping out with additional CTAs, directing to pages with more information or free trial pages. Is there any downside to this approach from an organic perspective? is there anything specific to keep in mind when creating these if not?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Chris8198
        Chris8198 @MikeTek last edited by

        Thanks very much, Mike!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • MikeTek
          MikeTek last edited by

          Hi Chris,

          It's not entirely clear how this will impact SEO, but there is some indication hidden content could be weighted lower by Google.

          Google has said in the past that such hidden content will not be weighted equally to visible content. In the early part of this blog post there's a helpful summary of Google engineering statements on this issue: https://www.freshegg.co.uk/blog/technical-seo/google/how-does-google-treat-hidden-content

          It's at least somewhat likely that content contained in lightboxes will be weighted less than visible content. So while I'm not certain there is a downside, there could be and it's worth consideration for your new site design. There wouldn't be any kind of "penalty" for pages containing hidden content, but rankings for keywords/language contained in that content could be lower than they otherwise would be if the content were visible by default (without user interaction). I'd recommend planning for that.

          Best,
          Mike

          Chris8198 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
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