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[Pixelart]

Cursor,

In the test I did, I figured out I needed a black rectangle behind the text & image of each portfolio layer to overlay the original text of the portfolio main page.

And yes, that was what I was trying to say in my lengthy explanation, the user and search engines will only have search criteria applied to the portfolio intro page. From what I can tell the popup layer is being saved and treated like an image, including the text. Right?

[slavelle]

Could you use the framework that's there and have each popup layer contain an iframe to the content that is supposed to go in it and then within the design of the iframe'd content, have that have the additional page title and all that? I know iframe's are a little wierd regarding the way SEO applies, but as I understand, as long as the content that is being included in the iframe has links back into the main part of the site and they are located in the same site (not google or some forum or whatever), then they can be indexed.

Would this make them extra pages but still make the design work the way it is?

Sledger (I think) posted an example of something like this in his Star Trek looking example a little while back.

[steve.ledger]

Sledger (I think) posted an example of something like this in his Star Trek looking example a little while back.

Yes Scott - that was here
http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=38834

[slavelle]

Cursor,

Pretty sure no matter what the visitor would wind up at the portfolio page in general.

As with so many topics on SEO, there is a huge blurry area of what REALLY matters and what doesn't. I don't know if this case matters or not, but I suppose there's some amount of chance that Google may look at it as keyword loading or something.

I just did a page with a number of informative popups and I think it makes the home page "too full of text" so I'm going to probably restructure. Also, even if not for SEO, but tracking, it's hard to tell what things someone clicked on if they don't take them to a page, so it's hard to see the trends of what people read and what they don't on the site.

I'd be interested in knowing if this iframe idea works and what the exposure of the code is in that way to a search engine. I know they will read it, but I don't know where they will think that content lives and if it would be any better off than the content being literally on the popup instead of pulled into it.

[cursor]

That's not quite right, Pixelart.

The text on the popup layers are exported as text, not graphics. To illustrate, I've uploaded a sample page (that I attached to a previous post) to the web. On the third popup layer, called 'c', I've added the following text, "text on popup layer c". When this temporary webpage loads, click button [c], and you'll see the text. Now, right mouse-click on the web page, then select view source from the popup menu. With the HTML source now plugged into a notepad file, search for the text "text on popup layer c". Voilá.

So, the text is still there, and can be search-bot crawled ... but where will the searcher be taken when a link is provided to them by the search engine? My guess is that they will be taken to the bottom layer for that page. Again, I'd be curious to hear input from anyone who might know for sure.

[Pixelart]

Cursor, thanks. I figured out what my problem was, and you probably already know this. I had all elements for the first portfolio page grouped (text, images and link) when I copied over to the portfolio intro page as a layer. IF you leave the items grouped, it treats it all like an image, including the text. On the next layer, I did not keep all items grouped and it saved the text out as text separately, and appeared in the source code.

I also found the popup layer method is putting all text for the portfolio items in the code for the portfolio intro page, this will make for an enormous amount of code with content that is actually only on one identified page. From everything I'm finding this will play havoc with the search engines, keywords and especially for accessability issues, which I want to ultimately optimize for a little later when have more time. I talked with a couple of my more web tech savy friends and they also advised this was not a smart move to make, the search engines will not like this and probably penalize the site. All this stuff makes my head hurt!!

I think the popup layer technique is awesome for some applications, just not for something like a portfolio, where there are 20 pages with information being condensed down into one page.

I learned a LOT here. Thank you everyone who gave input.

Cheers,
Pixelart