Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Revolution Sliders - Still considered bad for SEO in 2018?
-
Hi guys, I have a question about revolution sliders. Are they generally speaking still technically considered to be bad for SEO?
I've done some research on this topic however most of the information I can find dates back to around 2009-2012, when sliders were mostly java and flash based. It seems that back then they were considered to be bad for SEO. Is this still the case?
We use revolution sliders because it's easy for us to overlay text and because it scales to mobile automatically. It also allows us to put alt texts and image titles in there - we don't use them for the purpose of sliding images.
Would there be any technical reason why a slider would be considered bad for SEO?
-
Thanks, Mike agreed!
-
Hey mike, thanks for the response. I’ve just PM’d you!
-
Hi rswhtn,
I can't add much more than others have here already.
Are sliders in general bad for SEO? If they diminish the user experience or slow down the page, they could hurt more than help. Technically speaking, speed is a potential reason. Since Google responds to signals of a satisfied user (and uses quality rating in their algo.), anything that impacts the user's impression of the value of a page is a potential factor for SEO.
Is Revolution Slider specifically good/bad for SEO? We have no indication Google has targeted specific WordPress plug-ins for security warnings / similar. If a site gets hacked and Google detects malware, different story, but there's no indication an unhacked Revolution Slider instance would impact SEO.
I think I'd consider UX here before SEO - are users engaging with the slider? Would they engage more with another layout? Split testing is easy and free with Google Optimize these days. Security may be an issue, but that's a valid concern with any plug-in.
Best,
Mike -
Sliders If you're talking about the main homepage is generally very negative compared to having a direct message. People want to understand what you do the instant that they come on your website. If your website sells mustache supplies and it takes the person more than five seconds to go through all the slides in order to understand what you do you may have just given up a sale.
See:
https://yoast.com/opinion-on-sliders/ & http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/
In addition, this is true for non-e-commerce sites basically all websites. Unless you are using it in some sort of a gallery format I would stay far away from a slider. They slow the site speed down by having to load another plug-in which requires JavaScript to load prior to being shown to the end-user a huge negative. On mobile devices, it's almost impossible for people to control them. They are antiquated and to the owner of the site they may look great but you have to think about everyone that's coming to your website not just yourself (we are all slightly biased to our own sites).
"Sliders suck and should be banned from your website" Michiel Heijmans of Yoast.com
"Use a static image instead"
“In A/B tests, sliders tend to lose. In fact, one of the easiest ways to grow a page’s conversion rate is to remove the slider, and to replace it with a static image. If you want to be really lazy, you can just test the slider against the static version of each of the slider’s options. The static version usually wins.”
Citing Karl Blanks, Chairman, and Co-Founder of Conversion Rate Experts
"1% clicked a feature. Of those, 89% were the first position. 1% of clicks for the most significant object on the home page?"
"nd.edu stats by @erunyon"
https://blog.sucuri.net/2014/09/slider-revolution-plugin-critical-vulnerability-being-exploited.html
The only bad things about revolution slider are its very heavy plug-in, it's the most exploited plug-in in the world, in fact, I believe the Panama papers were a result of a WordPress site with revolution slider not joking. also, sliders generally do not do as well as static images.
"Almost 10% of the compromised WordPress sites that we analyzed had a vulnerable version of RevSlider. When you combine RevSlider, Gravity Forms, and TimThumb, they account for 25% of the total compromised WordPress sites."
cite: https://sucuri.net/website-security/website-hacked-report
RevSlider never reached TimThumb’s scale, but it still affects websites months after it was first disclosed. The biggest challenge RevSlider faces is that it’s embedded within Themes and Frameworks and some website owners are unaware they have it installed until it TEMP has been used to adversely affect them via a compromise.
With this security feature, Sucuri is able to proactively protect your website
within minutes of a security event, like a Zero Day, being released to the
world. Example of dis at work include the recent Bash vulnerabilities, and
many of the software vulnerabilities mentioned above (me.e., RevSlider,
Mailpoet, etc…).Cite: https://wordpress.org/plugins/sucuri-cloudproxy-waf/
I would look at https://soliloquywp.com/ See: http://www.wpbeginner.com/best-wordpress-slider/
I hope this helps,
Tom
-
Thank you both for the replies, that's very helpful. We're going to take a look and see what we can do with them
Andy - I've PM'd you!
-
Hello,
I have personally found sliders to be ineffective, not bad for seo but bad for the user experience. If you have 8 seconds to capture a users attention the first time they come to a website why hide all the information on consecutive sliders. Most people never see the second or third slider. So to increase conversions why not sell then above the fold with one good piece of information.
That's just my two cents,
Don Silvernail
-
Hi,
As long as everything works and the slides are used to enhance the page and get important points across, then there are no reasons (technically) why it should be considered bad. Test in different browsers and mobile devices to ensure there are no problems.
However... On a mobile, I don't actually like sliders and much prefer just a static image to speed up the load times. Most will give you the option to do this. Speed is probably one of the main reasons I am cautious with them because they can add a lot of size to the page, which results in increased load times.
Just try and keep in mind to use it as a way to enhance the page rather than for anything to do with SEO.
-Andy
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
-
Kind of duplicate categories and custom taxonomy. Necessary, but bad for SEO?
Hello Everyone! I'm new here! My husband and I are working on creating a website: https://sacwellness.com .The site is an online therapist directory for the the Sacramento California area. Our problem is this: In wordpress our category system is being used for blog posts. Our theme is using a custom taxonomy system to categorize different therapist specialties, therapeutic approaches, etc. We've found ourselves in a position where our custom taxonomy and categories are near duplicates. for example we have the blog categories: ADHD counseling, Anxiety therapy, and Career counseling our corresponding custom taxonomy/therapist categories are: ADHD, Anxiety, and....(oops) career counseling. My understanding is that google doesn't see a difference between identically named categories and custom taxonomies and will so choose one to rank and disregard the other, effectively leaving you competing against yourself. is this true in a case like this? Can google maybe understand the difference because of the custom taxonomy and/or URL paths? if this is a problem is it ok to have near duplicates....like ADHD vs. ADHD counseling. This has been our solution so far....but now we're questioning it....derp x_x. I thought about tagging the categories with no index, but I think the archive pages would be useful for people. Essentially we have 2 sets of archives for each keyword. One is for blog posts, and one is for therapists who work with that particular issue along with the 6 most recent blog posts in that category.....because we are putting the 6 most recent blog posts at the bottom of the therapist pages I feel like it wouldn't be as terrible of a loss if we had to noindex the category pages. ....what do you think? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | angelamaemae0 -
Default Wordpress 301 Redirects of JS and CSS files. Bad for SEO & How to Fix?
Hi there: We are developers with some digital marketing expertise, but a current issue has us perplexed. An outside SEO firm has asked us to clean up a large number of 301 redirects. Most of these are 'default' Wordpress behavior that relate to calling the latest version of a JS or CSS file. For instance, a JS file is called with this: https://websitexyz.com/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js?ver=4.9.1 but ultimately redirects to this: https://websitexyz.com/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js. We are being asked to prevent the redirect from happening by, presumably, calling the ultimate file to begin with. The issue is that, as far as we know, there's no easy way to alter WP behavior to call the ultimate file to begin with. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew9290 -
Bad SEO Practice: in title tag?
Greetings, I just discovered that some of our content was produced with
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_Lifescript
tags in the title tag. Example: <title>Diabetes Symptoms <br> In Women Over 40</title> My gut says this is bad for SEO, but I couldn't find a definitive answer on the web, so I thought I would ask the community of gurus here at Moz. 🙂 Thanks in advance for any reply. Kind regards, Eric0 -
Onsite SEO vs Offsite SEO
Hey I know the importance of both onsite & offsite, primarily with regard to outreach/content/social. One thing I am trying to determine at the moment, is how much do I invest in offsite. My current focus is to improve our onpage content on product pages, which is taking some time as we have a small team. But I also know our backlinks need to improve. I'm just struggling on where to spend my time. Finish the onsite stuff by section first, or try to do a bit of both onsite/offsite at the same time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Is tabbed content bad for SEO?
I work for a Theater show listings and ticketing website. In our show listings pages (e.g. http://www.theatermania.com/broadway/this-is-our-youth_302998/) we split our content into separate tabs (overview, pricing and show dates, cast, and video). Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by separating the content? Are we better served with keeping it all in a single page? Thanks so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Sitewide footer links - bad or not?
Hi, Sitewide footer links, is this bad for SEO? Basically I see all the time the main navigation repeated in the footer, sometimes as almost something to just fill the footer up. Is this bad for SEO (im guessing it is) and can you explain why you think it is? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Web fonts & SEO
Hi everyone ! My question is regarding web fonts. We are currently working on a new design for our website and we're thinking about using web fonts instead of images containing the fonts we'd like to have. I'd like to know if web fonts can affect SEO as they need to be downloaded on the visitor's computers and consequently can slow down the load time of our web pages. If anyone has used web fonts in the past, do you have some specific tips to share ? Thank you in advance for your answers! Jeremie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maxxum0