This week’s Ask an SEO question comes from Hrvoje from Osijek, Croatia, who asks:
“Hello, we would like to add several sliders for daily news on the homepage of our website and update the sliders daily.
Is this bad for our site’s SEO?
Is there anything we need to know or do about SEO? thank you for your help. “
Oh, the homepage slider.
At some point in their career, every SEO expert has learned to lament these—often for different reasons.
Before diving into sliders, let’s start with the literal answer to the question.
Using a news slider on the homepage isn’t inherently bad for SEO.
When done right, they can help with your SEO.
However, they can be a headache if done wrong.
Let’s dive into the water.
SEO News Slider Considerations
Whether a slider helps or hurts your SEO depends on how it’s coded.
Slider coding tips
If you’re using a dynamic ajax type widget to load the header content on click or some kind of delay, scrolling, or other user action, search engines may not see it.
Search engines don’t take “actions” like clicking or scrolling, so they don’t see anything that depends on them.
If your developers have coded everything in the header into the Document Object Model (DOM), then this shouldn’t be a problem for search engines.
They’ll see everything on each slide at once and index it as they see fit.
There are many ways to code it like this, and many plugins to do it automatically.
There are a few other things to keep in mind when it comes to sliders.
Use title in slider
One of my most annoying problems is the use of headers in it.
Slider plugins or developers often code them so that they break the header structure of the rest of the page, which can sometimes cause problems with your accessibility audits.
In fact, there are many Accessibility issues with titles You need to think outside the scope of this article.
Slider availability
My biggest problem with sliders is that most people don’t use them.
Throughout my career, we have conducted numerous heatmap studies and click studies on client websites.
One insight that always surfaced: People were very engaged with the default slide in the slider, but hardly anyone clicked to advance the slide or interact with content beyond the first slide.
Sliders are a great political compromise – allowing everyone to put their important information in the same place – but in reality, most users just don’t interact with them.
Now, I’ve never done this research for news sites, only brand sites. So please do your own research.
I guess a news site would get different results.
As for whether you should worry about SEO, my best advice is to insert a requirement that all slider content must Loaded into the DOM with the page, rather than dynamically based on user actions – you’ll be good to go!
Good luck.
More resources:
Featured Image: VectorMine/Shutterstock
