Does the use of sliders for text-on-page, effects SEO in any way?

[RKanfi]

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?

faq.html

[RKanfi]

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

[Resultify]

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

[RKanfi]

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

[ThompsonPaul]

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