Google Indexing and Redirects

manpreet Best Answer 3 years ago

I have a site (I can't provide a link to it), where we're using links to generate lightboxes that have iframes to content.

We're linking to the content like so:

   href='/path/to/lightbox.php' onclick='generateLightbox("/path/to/lightbox.php")'>link

On the page, we're using the following to forward to the main page and open up a lightbox if a user tries to access the lightbox content directly:

Our problem is that google is not indexing these lightbox pages. While going through the webmaster tools, it's giving a warning that a "redirect" is detected.

Is there anyway I can make sure to redirect users to the main page and open up a lightbox without tripping up google's quality checker? I believe my problem is that google is seeing the redirect and not indexing the content, yet I'm using the method I've seen suggested on a couple different resources such as this SO question: Redirects & Google Indexing

manpreet 3 years ago

In the end, the only solution we could find was to detect for google bot, and not redirect.