Does the use of sliders for text-on-page, effects SEO in any way?
-
The concept of using text sliders in an e-commerce site as a solution to placing SEO text above or in between product and high on ages, seems too good to be true.... or is it?
How would a text slider for FAQ or other on-page text done with sliding paragraphs (similar but not this specific code- http://demo.tutorialzine.com/2010/08/dynamic-faq-jquery-yql-google-docs/faq.html) might effect text-on-page SEO. Does Google consider it hidden text?
Would there be any other concerns or best practices with this design concept?
-
Fredrik,
This is very helpful and gives me a clearer understanding as to how to make this work properly. The example was just that, and meant to explain basic functionality. We'll make sure we end up using an index-able HTML based version.
Much thanks for your advise.
ron
-
Hi Ron
As Paul stated there are many ways of doing sliders. Most of the new sliders out there do work with JavaScript but often used already loaded dom elements for the slides. That means that the actual content is in the HTML and the JavaScript is used to animate or style them. This content would then be indexed just as a normal div would.
You can also use http://www.seobrowser.com/, (simple option is free) to see the page as Google would see it. If you then can read your content it should be possible to index it.
One thing to think of is that sliders, as the name implies, often contains more than one slide. If the slider has a heading in it it might be a good thing to make the first heading H1 and secondary sliders H2. This way you can place your most important content in the first slide.
Not sure if you use Jquery but if you do http://jquerytools.org/ offer great power and flexibility. Please note that I am NOT connected to them or work for them. We have just used their scripts on variious of our projects.
I had a quick look at your example and unfortunetely that would have a very hard time getting indexed since content is in the javascript. I would consider putting all content in the HTML and then just hide and show sections using Jquery instead.
Have a great day and good luck
Fredrik
-
Hi Paul,
Thank you so much for the detailed answer. deep down i worried this might be the case.
The truth is that the text in question is pretty much for SEO reasons only. Do you know f a better way, or another kind of script that would serve to have the text indexed?
Ron
-
The answer is that it actually depends very much on exactly what kind of coding is used to accomplish the effect, Ron.
In most cases, this kind of slider effect is accomplished using some variation of JavaScript. While Google has said it is "trying" to have it's crawlers recognize text from scripts, it almost never works that way.
So it won't be flagged as "hidden" text, because in fact Google won't even consider it to exist on the page.
An easy way to test is to view the source for the page in question - you'll see that none of the words of text actually exist on the page in any form, even in the code.
For the ultimate example of this - go into Google Webmaster Tools and use the Fetch as Googlebot tool to fetch the page. Then you'll see exactly the content that googlebot will see. It won't see the text, therefor it can't index and rank it. Ergo no SEO benefit at all.
Where you could get into trouble is if you did have text on the page designed to make googlebot think the page is about one thing, while using this kind of scripted text to try to show the visitor something completely different and unrelated. Google could then suspect you of cloaking and penalize accordingly. (Cloaking is when you intentionally show googlebot one thing and the user something different for nefarious purposes)
But if you're adding the text as a usability enhancement for your visitors in a way that googlebot doesn't happen to understand, you won't get any SEO benefit from it, but you also shouldn't be penalized for it.
Paul
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do old website files in the public_html effect SEO?
My client has about a dozen old folders filled with old websites including index files, robots, htaccess files. They are all located in separate files with in public_html. Does this effect them negatively?
Technical SEO | | Renalynd0 -
SEO implications when changing the business function however using the same domain name
Hi Everyone, Request some advice on the following situation please: If a client wishes to start a new business (advertising agency) using a domain name that they previously used for a completely different business function (selling hats & t-shirts) Is there anything you can do to "clean" the domain so that the previous indexing of the domain does not effect the new business and give the client a fresh start. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Regards and thanks.
Technical SEO | | Republica0 -
Are image pages considered 'thin' content pages?
I am currently doing a site audit. The total number of pages on the website are around 400... 187 of them are image pages and coming up as 'zero' word count in Screaming Frog report. I needed to know if they will be considered 'thin' content by search engines? Should I include them as an issue? An answer would be most appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
SEO value of InDesign pages?
Hi there, my company is exploring creating an online magazine built with Adobe's InDesign toolset. If we proceeded with this, could we make these pages "as spiderable" as normal html/css webpages? Or are we limited to them being less spiderable, or not at all spiderable?
Technical SEO | | TheaterMania1 -
Do I need to do on-page SEO for my mobile site?
We have a desktop site, and we just built our first mobile site. Right now, the mobile site doesn't have any title tags, meta descriptions or anything like that, but do I need to even do that? If I have all of that on the desktop site, and the mobile site is just redirected from the desktop site, can't I just do it on the desktop site only? Is there anything to gain from doing it for both sites?
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Pages extensions
Hi guys, We're in the process of moving one of our sites to a newer version of the CMS. The new version doesn't support page extensions (.aspx) but we'll keep them for all existing pages (about 8,000) to avoid redirects. The technical team is wondering about the new pages - does it make any difference if the new pages are without extensions, except for usability? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | lgrozeva0 -
How to set Home page for the best effect
My head is spinning with all the confusing possibilities. Does anybody have an easy answer for setting up the home page and its canonical-ishness ie Which gives the best SEO Mojo ? \ \default.aspx \keyword\ \keyword\default.aspx Thanking you in advance for reducing the number of business migranes around the globe.
Technical SEO | | blinkybill0 -
Micro formats to block HTML text portions of pages
I have a client that wants to use micro formatting to keep a portion of their page (the disclaimer) from being read by the search engines. They want to do this because it will help with their keyword density on the rest of the page and block the “bad keywords” that come from their legally required disclaimer. We have suggested alternate methods to resolve this problem, but they do not want to implement those, they just want a POV from us explaining how this micro formatting process will work. And that’s where the problem is. I’ve never heard of this use case and can’t seem to find anyone who has. I'm posting the question to the Moz Community to see if anyone knows how microformats can keep copy from being crawled by the bots. Please include any links to sites that you know that are using micro formatting in this way. Have you implemented it and seen results? Do you know of a website that is using it now? We're looking for use cases please!
Technical SEO | | Merkle-Impaqt0