Does Content on Carousel harm SEO? Is the content of the Carousel that is hidden indexed?
I am having a doubt regarding the carousel and how its contents are indexed or not by the search crawlers .
First of all, I believe that most carousels are not as friendly from the point of view of accessibility. This alone could already hurt content indexing. Apart from this problem of access to hidden content, it still has the issue of indexing that content that is not visible in the screen.
Notice that in this model only one slide is visible at a time, the other 3 slides are hidden, and they are the ones that worry me...
Then the doubts remained.
- can search crawlers index the full contents of a carousel or just the first slide?
- from an SEO point of view is it worth using this kind of "component"?
1 answers
I was reading this article a while ago because I had the same doubt : https://www.workhorsemkt.com/pros-and-cons-content-carousels /
By their nature, carousels require loading additional images and scripts to achieve their goal. Because website performance (loading speed) is a key user experience, and SEO metric, every second counts. The use of a single static image accompanied by HTML text, rather than multiple images, and the scripts needed to run a carousel will always perform better. In particular, carousels use precious bandwidth on mobile devices on slower connections. We also often encounter "carousel creep," a situation where content managers keep adding more and more slides without removing the old ones that have expired.
Also the article shows that there are problems in SEO when using Carousel:
Often, the textual component of a carousel is embedded into the image slide in a carousel. This means that a search bot cannot read and understand the content and hierarchy of the image content. While you can (and should) always add alt text to an image, this solution is less than ideal. The alternative text of the image is expected to describe that image, not replacing the HTML content. For example, in HTML content, you can have headers, lists, formatting (Bold, Italic), etc ... None of this is supported by alternative text. Therefore, search engines (and the visually impaired) may have difficulty understanding the structure and content of the slide.
In the matter also has several tips on this topic, in addition to the summary that I put here, it is worth taking a look !