How to fix non-crawlable pages affected by CSS modals?

[Dan-Louis]

I stumbled across something new when doing a site audit in SEMRUSH today ---> Modals.

The case: Several pages could not be crawled because of (modal:) in the URL.

What I know: "A modal is a dialog box/popup window that is displayed on top of the current page" based on CSS and JS.

What I don't know: How to prevent crawlers from finding them.

[zeehj]

Hi Dan-Louis – all depends on what content these modals are serving, and how your modals are being served.

1. Have you checked to make sure that some resource your modals rely on isn't blocked in /robots.txt (you can also plug a URL with a modal into Search Console's robots.txt checker)? What about meta robots noindex?
2. On mobile, do you have pop ups that are obscuring content on the page?
3. Have you checked any pages with these pop ups/modals in Search Console's fetch and render tool? What resources, if any, are blocked?

TBH I don't like relying on SEMRush (or any singular SEO tool for that matter) for ID'ing technical SEO problems. When was the last time you performed a tech audit?

Keep me posted on what you uncover...