Does this content get indexed?

[Bigheadigital]

A lot of content on this site is displayed in pop up pages.

Eg. Visit the Title page

http://www.landgate.wa.gov.au/corporate.nsf/web/Certificate+of+Title

To access the sample report or fee details, the info is shown in a pop up page with a strange url. Example:

http://www.landgate.wa.gov.au/corporate.nsf/web/Certificate+of+Title+-+Fee+Details

I can't see any of these pages being indexed in Google or other search engines when I do a site search: http://www.landgate.wa.gov.au/corporate.nsf/web/Certificate+of+Title+-+Fee+Details

Is there a way to get this content indexed besides telling the client to restructure this content?

[ThompsonPaul]

Those pages are linked using normal hrefs in the page's code, so there's no reason they couldn't be indexed. The popup effect is being created by a JavaScript onclick event, which, as its name implies, only fires after a visitor has clicked on a link, which wouldn't affect Google.

The site isn't doing itself any favours with its unusual use of a "plus" sign as a word delimiter in it's URLs instead of a hyphen, but that only makes the URLs look strange to a human user and also shouldn't affect the search engines.

Are those pages linked from anywhere else on the site? Because they're on a page that is 4 directories deep, and the page itself has quite a few links, it's entirely possible that the search engine simply isn't crawling deeply enough on the site to get those links.

Getting some external incoming links to those pages might help with indexing, as would linking to them from pages closer to the root of the domain. The FAQ page in particular might be worth earning some extra visibility.

The bigger question is - are they the kinds of pages a user would actually enter a search term for?

Paul

[Bigheadigital]

Thanks, ThompsonPaul. I found the pages on Google eventually but I agree that the + signs make them look strange to a human user. I think it's their CMS that's doing this. I"ll check.

My initial idea was that the content on the FAQ pages was quite relevant and keyword rich and I wanted to ensure it was getting indexed. It looks like it is, but if someone hit that page from a search term the page isn't branded at all - looks quite spamming, so I don't think in it's current state it's worth trying to get more traffic.

I'll focus on the pages higher up in the directory in terms of internal and external links.

Thanks!

[ThompsonPaul]

I would absolutely agree with you that the FAQ and Help pages would be very useful for searchers, and that the current lack of branding on those pages is a problem. I'd be really tempted to integrate their content into regular pages that could be linked to as usual instead of as popups with no site navigation or breadcrumbs.

Good luck!

Paul

PS I agree it's the CMS using the "+" signs - big job to change them & create all the rewrite rules, but they sure are a usabiltiy issue!