Are Hover/Fade-In Ads OK for SEO?

[imbckagn]

This may be a dumb question but are hover/fade in type popups OK for SEO? The popup uses a simple javascript in the footer from Aweber.

I already know that popups are generally horrible but it's the nature of my website that makes it OK.

[goodroi]

simple is always better. the more complex your code the harder it is for search engines. search engines have made alot of progress dealing with javascript and some progress with flash. plain, boring html is still the easiest for them to do with.

it is generally best to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to crawl and find your content.
(unless of course you are trying to hide something :))

[setzer]

With Google's new preview thing, it may capture the popup. I haven't seen this happen yet but something to consider. It won't affect crawling of a page, though, as Google's robots only look at the raw HTML.