Skip to main content

Dear Unbounce Team,

dear Unbounce Users,


we absolutely love the new multiple lightbox feature and use it a lot to display our forms, image galeries, Q&A texts and so on. It really helped us a lot to place a lot of additional information and content on our pages though keeping them “light and easy” looking.


But there is a big problem we’re confronted with now. The content inside the lightboxes ranks just as well in Google as the main landingpage does. Sometimes the lightboxes even appear above the main landingpage in the search list.

As the content in the landingpage wasn’t meant to be seen without having seen the whole landingpage before, this of course makes a lot of customers bounce as they don’t understand the whole concept plus they don’t have a chance to reach the main landingpage.


Of course we could place a link “back to the main page” on every single lightbox to prevent people from being stuck there. But it would be a way better solution to hide (certain) lightboxes from search engines in the first place. It really doesn’t help our SEO concept when we want people to find one landingpage, but instead they find 6 different ones, with only one that makes sense for them.


Will there be a possibility to select for every lightbox wether they should be visible for search engines or not? Or is there another solution?

This would really help us a lot.


Best regards from Germany 🙂

I assume this happens because all the content is stored as part of this “page”.  


Possible solution: What you could do is create a second page and hide that one from search engine (checkbox) then use lightbox to call the non-indexed content. 

You’ve raised a really good point Annick. This is something that our Development and Product teams are actively working on addressing. We should have an update on this soon.


In the meantime, a potential workaround would be to apply the following meta tag to your Lightbox:


You should also be able to apply this meta tag to all Lightboxes on a domain in Script Manager. The setup should look something like this:



I hope this helps!

love this solution however I would check these pages with screaming frog or some other Google crawler simulator to see how the page is rendering.  There is a chance if google encounters that META tag anywhere on the page it might not index the entire page.  Worth testing with view source.

Thanks a lot for the workaround. I didn’t know I could place code for lightboxes only in the script manager.


We will keep an eye on SEO and get back to you if there is a problem. But it looks very reasonable until now. 🙂

Hey AJ,


You brought up a valid concern re adding the meta robots “noindex” tag to lightboxes; however, doing so will not cause any indexation issues with your landing page. The reason being is that lightboxes are served up through a separate URL so they are not considered as part of the content of your landing page (in the eyes of search engines). Blocking the lightboxes from search engines is safe. 


If you come across something unexpected happening, definitely let us know.

so when you add a lightbox any of that content is stored as a another “page” ? 

In the eyes of a search engine, yes.


Browseo.net is a great tool to use to see how search engines interpret your page’s content.

Reply


Terms & ConditionsCookie settings