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I have created a modal box that initially hides the modal box contents with css display: none. Then, I heard from some article that using this display:none could prevent google bot from crawling the contents, and it is not good for SEO.
Instead, it recommends me to use absolute positioning to create negative position values and hide that content.
I am trying to look for some good example of modal box that actually use this technique but I was wondering if:
- modal box contents are really hidden from google to crawl?
- Is this common practice to use negative position value for absolute positioning when creating a modal box?
- Any good example I could look?
2
Answers
Don’t use 0 height, negative margins to hide content. Google is able to understand now that you have hidden content in this way. Actually, inserting zero height for an element with text in it might trigger a flag with the Googlebot.
If you need to send text info to the crawler, then insert that text in the meta description tag. This way visitors do not see that, but Google will.
I’m an SEO. Google never gives a definitely yes or no answer, but the general consensus is placing content in modals and hiding them results in that content still being crawled, but it is held with less significance. This makes sense as most of the information Google is looking for would/should be presented to the user when the webpage is opened, not after. The majority of your ranking results will be due to your immediate on page seo. I wouldn’t experiment with trying to transition or hide content in this way as Google does have methods of detecting this sort of thing, an could result in an even worse outcome for the site.