text windows in pano and search engines

Q&A about the latest versions
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Carel
Posts: 178
Joined: Tue Sep 12, 2006 5:59 am
Location: Pasadena, CA USA
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Do search engines have access to the text that appears in a popup window (for instance click on an info button and a text window pops up)?
I am making a web-page as cylindrical panorama for a friend and he would like the "info" and "about" text in a popup window, but it needs to be accessible by search engines.

Carel Struycken
Don
Posts: 143
Joined: Thu Mar 07, 2013 2:59 pm
Location: Southern California

Good question. Definitely they could, but they probably don't, because of the overhead, and if they do, then they keep their cards hidden. It seems safe to imagine most search engines only index the public facing data, i.e. that data which displays when the page is rendered, including meta tags, and not any of the buried data, i.e. scripted tooltips, pop-ups and other programmatically displayed data.

One option might be: To ensure buried data gets indexed, replicate that data in meta tags:
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/20 ... -Meta-Tags

From this search:
https://www.google.com/#q=do+search+eng ... ascript%3F

I found the following helpful:
1. http://moz.com/ugc/can-google-really-ac ... ipt-really
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_indexing
3. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8262 ... -web-pages
Carel
Posts: 178
Joined: Tue Sep 12, 2006 5:59 am
Location: Pasadena, CA USA
Contact:

Thanks for the links. I learned some new things, like "innerHTML". It sounds like the text in js "may" be indexed, or not...
I am now using Google's webtools to figure out what is going on. After I made the index.html (with title and meta description tags) a fullscreen (browser-filling) iframe and placed the pano inside, the title and description tags are picked up by google again: http://www.ddi.ms/
One can do some interesting things when using a pano as a website interface, but if nothing inside the pano gets crawled by search engines, it will not work well.

Carel
Don
Posts: 143
Joined: Thu Mar 07, 2013 2:59 pm
Location: Southern California

Excellent work. Looking good - as always.
http://www.ddi.ms/

This is the search phrase I would use to Google that web site, "site://www.ddi.ms" and see what has been indexed.
Carel
Posts: 178
Joined: Tue Sep 12, 2006 5:59 am
Location: Pasadena, CA USA
Contact:

It is good to see that google actually crawls more than what the sitemap includes. On my own website I have lots of links in subdirectories and those do not get included when generating a sitemap.
I have no idea if a button link in a pano2vr panorama is "seen" by the crawlers. It would be very helpful if that was the case.
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