Prerequisites

• I have searched for similar issues in both open and closed tickets and cannot find a duplicate.
• The issue still exists against the latest stable version of Elementor.

Description

The href's of pop-up triggers cause 404's for indexing bots and SEO reporting software. I already submitted this to support and they told me it would be in an update, but that haven't happened yet. "%23elementor-action%3Aaction%3Dpopup%3Aopen%26settings%3DeyJpZCI6IjgxMSIsInRvZ2dsZSI6ZmFsc2V9"

Steps to reproduce

Add pop-up trigger to website
Run a SEO audit using https://seranking.com/
You'll see the HREF attribute of the pop-up trigger returns 404's.

Isolating the problem

• This bug happens with a default WordPress theme active.
• This bug happens with only Elementor plugin active (and Elementor Pro).
• I can reproduce this bug consistently using the steps above.

Temporary solution

Since a lot of people are commenting I want everybody to be able to see the temporary solution.

Temporary fix I discovered:

• Remove the link from the button, icon or text
• Add an ID to the element you want to trigger your pop-up with
• Go to Pop-up settings > Advanced > Open By Selector
• Fill in your selector (with an ID add # in front of it)
• This will remove the tag to the trigger, so scrapers won't see an invalid link anymore.

For the developers of Elementor Pro
I've discovered the problem. The href value contains %23 instead of an # symbol. When a bot tries to crawl the page, this results into a 404 error, if you copy the link and change %23 to #, you will see the pop-up.

I think this is an issue in the encoding of URL's