Carousel content harms SEO? Is the hidden Carousel content indexed?

Question

I have a question about Carrousel and how its content is indexed or not by crawlers search.

First, I believe that most Carousels are not so friendly from the point of view of Accessibility. This alone could already hinder the indexing of content. Taking away this problem of access to hidden content, there is still the question of indexing this content that is not visible on the screen.

Note that in this model only one slide is visible at a time, the other 3 slides are hidden, and it is they that concern me...

Then there were doubts.

• Search crawlers can index the total content of a Carousel or just the first slide?
• From the point of view of SEO it is worth using this type of "component"?

Answer 1

I was reading this article a while ago because I had the same question : https://www.workhorsemkt.com/pros-and-cons-content-carousels/

By their nature, carousels require loading additional images and scripts to achieve their goal. Because site performance (load 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 a precious bandwidth on mobile devices on slower connections. We also often find "carrousel creep", a situation where content managers keep adding more and more slides without removing the old losers.

In addition the article shows that there are SEO problems when using Carousel :

Often, the textual component of a carousel is embedded into the image slide on a carousel. This means that a search bot cannot read and understand the content and hierarchy of the image content. Although you can (and should) always add alternative text (alt) to an image, this solution is less than ideal. The image’s alternate text is expected to describe that image, NOT replacing the HTML content. For example, in HTML content, you may have headers, lists, formatting (bold, italics), etc ... None of this is supported by alternative text. Therefore, search engines (and the visually impaired) may have difficulty understanding the slide’s structure and content.

In the matter also has several tips about this topic, in addition to the summary I put here, it is worth taking a look !