Help with Getting Googlebot to See Google Charts
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We received a message from Google saying we have an extremely high number of URLs that are linking to pages with similar or duplicate content. The main difference between these pages are the Google charts we use. It looks like Google isn't able to see these charts (most of the text are very similar) and the charts (lots of it) are the main differences between these pages.
So my question is what is the best approach to allowing Google to see the data that exists in these charts?
I read from here http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/69818/how-can-i-get-google-to-index-content-that-is-written-into-the-page-with-javascr that a solution would be to have the text that is displayed on the charts coded into the html and hidden by CSS. I'm not sure but it seems like a bad idea to have it seen by Google but hidden to the user by CSS. It just sounds like a cloaking hack. Can someone clarify if this is even a solution or is there a better solution?
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Well - charts in JS is OK for user but NOT ok for bots. Hiding text is "devalued" them and also not ok for bots.
Probably the best is if you use some tool as PhantomJS and make static image of charts. Can be PNG or JPG with lot of text (alt and title) that describing what is this image. I know that this wasn't answer you're expecting, but bots can't see everything that JavaScript make.
I forgot... MOZ have same issue with their WBF - text and video only. So look strange for bots. From two years they make text representation of video too. Now layout is text-video-text-text-text-text. Seems that works for them.
So mine idea is try to make chart and below make text representation of what is in this charts with lot of text. Bots love this (and humans too!) and you can leave JS code then.