Will having image lightbox with content on a web page SEO friendly?

[RyanKent]

The biggest gap I see on your site is your images are all missing ALT tags. Search engines don't see images the way people do. By providing an alt tag, you can offer a description of each image. For example your first image alt tag might be "logo Coco & Max Doggie Distinctions".

There are many packages of javascript code which use Lightbox so if you want a more definite answer you would need to take a look at your specific package. Highslide and Suckerfish are two examples of Lightbox javascript coding packages. For additional research you can check out this article.

Another note. I would recommend changing your Meta description to readable text, not a list of key words. Your meta description is what people will see as your listing in search engines. It will not affect your search result ranking.

[WilliamBay]

Hey Ryan,

The Original Poster is actually talking about the text descriptions of each logo that is listed.

The easy way to figure this out is to look in the HTML. If it's real text, then Google can crawl it. In your case it is. 
So the content you have will be indexed.

And you can do as Ryan suggested and add Alt Attribute to each image. It will help as well.

[dignan99]

Lightbox should have zero negative impact in regards to SEO, providing you have effectively labeled your photos.  I love the look of it, and although has a similar effect to flash, they have nothing to do with eachother in regards to negative SEO.

[RyanKent]

Hi William.

Thanks for the feedback. I did look at the HTML and the real text is NOT visible. I am pretty sure that Google can read it even in the javascript, but I am not certain so I did not wish to offer that conclusively. If I knew which version was in use, such as Highslide, I could check and offer a confirmation.

The first image shared is the Coco and Max logo. If you click on that image the Lightbox will appear with a description that says "The Jenn Lee Group developed photography, business cards, expo-banner plus an ecommerce website for Coco and Max using a logo they had already developed. The Jenn Lee Group can pick up the ball at whatever stage you are currently in towards your marketing and advertising initiatives. Call us today! 401-885-3200"

I do not see that text snippet anywhere in the page's source code. Also, there are a total of 7 pictures offered in a group with that first image, each which their own text.

If you have any additional information, I would love to learn as well.

[WilliamBay]

Hi Ryan,

Yes, I just did a search for the text I found in the Lightbox description for the Coco & Max logo. Right there. I've attached a couple images to show what I found.

Is this underneath a Javascript?  I'd be interested to learn about the differences between different scripts as I see myself building sites that I would like to use the most SEO beneficial one.

coco-max-lightbox.png coco-max-html.png

[RyanKent]

Thank you William. Somehow I missed it during my review of the source code.

[WilliamBay]

Sure thing brother!

[VizionSEO99]

thanks for all the responses guys.

my thoughts were most of the time it depends upon the script because some script hide data from the viewers while it shows the same data to Search Engine which turns out Clocking issue on website.. this could be proved very dangerous for the website.

Also seems like google does not crawl the images as often than normal web page.. because it hide the contents and creates unauthenticated website.

[RyanKent]

Those are not issues on your site.

Your light box images are fully crawlable. Google sees all of the images and the text descriptions. You definitely want to add an ALT description. Otherwise you are in great shape.

[VizionSEO99]

This post is deleted!

[RyanKent]

I have read that article before. Keep in mind it is from 2008. Technology and Google have advanced substantially in the past 3 years.

100% of the text in all your lightbox is fully viewable by Google presently. William and I both looked and we see the text in your html source code. That means Google can see it as well.

[jamesjackson]

Sorry for butting in on an old(ish) post, but I have a different opinion on this...

Correct the text used in the example does show up in the source code as HTML, but I dont think that indicates that google is reading that text.

For me there are two ways to check to see if Google is reading text:

1. Do an exact match (quotation marked) search in google.

2. Look at the cached version of the page in google in text only version.

From that information, the lightbox data is not showing up and for me that would indicate that the text is not being read.

Also, an interesting point to note is that 'Fetch as Googlebot' should not be used as a method of identifying what text is being parsed according to searchengineland http://searchengineland.com/see-what-googlebot-sees-on-your-site-27623

Feel free to prove me wrong!

thanks

james

[InfrontWebworks]

James is correct.  Your lightbox content is not visible to a Google Bot.

You can see from an exact match search of some text from the page that Google has indexed the visible text: http://bit.ly/nDQLlM

The only place that the exact text from the lightbox appears in the Google index is on this thread: http://bit.ly/mRQICc

[RyanKent]

I agree with your assessment James.

Before I accept this information I would like to ask if you are aware of any other similar examples of lightbox use on a page with better stats? The DA of this page is only 31, and PA is 1. I would like to rule out the idea Google may crawl deeper if the page was deemed more important.

[jamesjackson]

Interesting supposition. i've got absolutely no idea if a stronger page changes the specific parts of a page are parsed.

Shouldn't be too difficult to work out though:

If we work on the logic that an exact match search result indicates that the text is being read and used by google, you can then compare javascript parsing across strong and weak pages.

Another way would be to look at the cached text only version across pages and see if there is any difference, although I think I prefer the first suggestion

Seems simple, although it probably isn't

j

[InfrontWebworks]

Ryan and James,

Take a closer look at the div class of the lightbox (class="contact").  In the CSS for the page in question we find the following:

div.contact {

display: none;
visibility: hidden;

}

In my opinion, you're asking the wrong question.  This isn't about lightboxes or DA at all; it's about the display:none; and visibility: hidden; elements.

There is no shortage of information about that here on SEOmoz or in the Google Webmaster Forums.

[jamesjackson]

Hi Dale,

Really stupid question, how do I look at the CSS to identify that? I've viewed source but cant see that information anywhere on the page.

If you wouldn't mind, could you point me in the right direction of some information about this issue, I would be interested in understanding it better, but until you brought it to my attention, I had no idea even to look for it

J