Is there an SEO penalty for text that appears only in a pop-up box when you hover the mouse over an icon?
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A client of mine wants to streamline the look of his web pages, taking some of the visible body copy and putting it into boxes that pop up when you hover the mouse over an icon. My understanding is that search engines will index this pop-up text. However, do they penalize pages that have text in pop-up boxes out of concern that those pages are spammy? In this case, the text and the page are perfectly legitimate e-commerce pages. Thanks for any insights you can offer.
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I can't see why there would be a penalty, but if you give us an example of the code or plugin/solution you're using, we can research it a little and see if there are any problems.
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Can you drop some of the code for us to analyze?
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There won't be a penalty. But the question of whether or not the text is visible to search engines depends on how it pops up i.e. title attribute? JavaScript? AJAX?
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