SEO best practices for embedding content in a map

[Vacatia_SEO]

My company is working on creating destination guides for families exploring where to go on their next vacation. We've been creating and promoting content on our blog for quite some time in preparation for the map-based discovery. The UX people in my company are pushing for design/functionality similar to:
http://sf.eater.com/maps/the-38-essential-san-francisco-restaurants-january-2015

From a user perspective, we all love this, but I'm the SEO guy and I'm having a hard time figuring out the best way to guide my team regarding getting readers to the actual blog article from the left content area. The way they want to do it is to have the content displayed overtop the map when someone clicks on a pin. Great, but there's no way for me to optimize the map for every article. After all, if we have an article about best places to snorkel on Maui, I want Google to direct people to the blog article specific to that search term because that page is the authority on that subject. Additionally, the map page itself will have no original content because it will be pulling all the blog content from other URLS, which will get no visitors if people read on the map.

We also want people, when they find an article they like, to be able to copy a URL to share. If the article is housed on the map page, the URL will be ugly and long (not SEO friendly) based on parameters from the filters the visitor used to drill down to that article. So I don't think I can simply optimize the map filtered-URL. Can I?

The others on my team do not want visitors to ping pong back and forth between map and article and would prefer people stay on the discovery map. We did have a thought that we'd give people an option to click a link to read the article off the map but I doubt people will do it which means that page will never been visited, thus crushing it's page rank.

so questions: How can i pass link juice/SEO love from the map page to the actual blog article while keeping the user on the map? Does google pass that juice if you use Iframes? What about doing ajax calls? Anyone have experience doing this? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Should I trust that if I create good content, good UX and allow people to explore how they prefer, Google will give me the love?

Help me Rand Fishkin, you're my only hope!

[Vacatia_SEO]

bueller? bueller? bueller?

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[KaneJamison]

Hey Eric,

You've got a deep one here with a few different things going on. Let me start with some observations and then walk you through the direction I would take if this were my project:

1. The content on that example you gave is all HTML that's crawlable. So that page is getting indexed properly.
2. If you were to reduce the amount of content in the left section, and swap it with a button leading to the blog post, Google shouldn't have any problem indexing those links to the pages which have more content. In that sense, your map page would be no different than a blog archive page, with titles and teasers leading to a complete post.
3. Let's pretend for a second that we want to go with that solution, but we don't want users to have to leave the page to read the full content when they click the button. Then we'd want to display the content somehow in a way where we know it won't get indexed. We should be able to override that <a>link and load it into a popup instead of actually loading the page. If it gets displayed in a popup modal, that would be a nice experience without leaving the page. An iframe should ensure it's not indexed as content on the page, though you'd have to play with how it's sized and positioned. You could also load the content in with Javascript, though Google is more likely to index that properly than they used to do, and I can't recall which particular methods are non-indexable.</a>
   <a>* Your next point was regarding users sharing the proper URL. You can hardcode the share buttons to the URL that is appropriate for them to share. domain.com/map#snorkelmaui would be a good URL to enforce the map to flow down to the Snorkel Maui business listing, and domain.com/map/businesses/snorkel-maui/ would be more like the URL of the individual article that is separate from the map but which can be loaded in a modal. This page would probably have some kind of "back to the master map" button or functionality to lead users back to that full map page experience.* Your other point was regarding users not visiting the correct page and therefore it would rank poorly. This isn't a big deal. If it's getting indexed properly and has internal links flowing from the popular and (let's hope) well-linked map page, then it should rank just as well as any other URL on the site with internal links.</a>

<a></a>

<a>Option B: If you want to get really advanced and avoid the separate page experience, you could use some kind of AJAX pushState() scenario to change the URL while they're looking at the modal, and fix it when they exit to modal. Downside here is that if they refreshed the page they wouldn't see the map experience, they'd see the static page version. You could also take this pushstate approach and use it to create a single page experience that does have multiple URLs without leaving the page, but each individual page is rankable on its own. </a>These two blog posts should set you down the right path if you choose that option.

I think that covers your concerns and lays out 2 options for you, but let me know where you still have questions.

[Vacatia_SEO]

Thank you so much for this response. It is exactly what I was looking for. I would have searched the term PushState if I knew it existed. Thank you again. I friggin' love the Moz community!

[KaneJamison]

Not a problem - would love to see the finished version once you complete it.