Detail page popup questions for real estate client
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My client, discoverstl.com, recently changed their site structure so that the detail page for individual property opens as a popup within the main page they are visiting, see http://d.pr/i/e8ik after clicking view details on the featured property on the home page. While the url links out to a properly formatting detail page, such as VIEW DETAILS, the developer says this doesn't affect google as its a javascript tweak that pulls it into the existing page. I'm still not convinced and am looking if this is bad for our SEO campaign. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
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Your developer is correct (partially) :).
You see, that DOES affects SEO but in a good way. Over time, Google has learned to recognize what's best for the user, and from my personal point of view, having a "lightbox" (that's how that "window" is called) is far better than opening a new page if you can present the property details better. Whatever looks better for the user, then it will also look better for Google.
Google is also capable of running and understanding Javascript, therefore you shouldn't have any problem, even less, when the link actually points to the page, so search engines unable to run Javascript can still scrape the site perfectly.
Hope that helps!