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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Does having a product carousel on your homepage create confusion for search engine spiders / algorithms regarding key words for a page?

Many site templates from E commerce hosts such as Big Commerce have product carousels on the home page. Does this create confusion when the product titles which are scrolling through this section of the page are constantly changing?

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TJ Kelly

Expert in B2B Sales + Marketing, HubSpot & SEO

Probably not.

Most carousels these days are javascript-driven. Therefore the source code for those products exists on the page (and is therefore easily viewed by Google et al). The javascript moves items around the *screen* but it does not modify the *source.* And it's the source code that matters most to search engines.

The exception to my answer above is AJAX. If any products are being dynamically loaded to a page via an AJAX call, then they would hidden from search engines. Google's John Mueller confirmed about a year ago that, despite all their progress with javascript and AJAX, Google still struggles with some Ajax-driven websites — http://searchengineland.com/can-now-trust-google-crawl-ajax-sites-235267

So, as with so many answers in SEO: *it depends.*

If you have any specific examples, I'd be happy to take a look! Feel free to message me here on Clarity.

Answered almost 8 years ago

Roman Sukharenko

SEO & Paid Marketing Director

No it does not, search engine crawlers do not see images or videos, but only browse code. You can insert Alt Tags onto images which label the otherwise unseen aspects of your website. I would label the carousel something ambiguous with relevancy to your keywords or I would just stay away from labeling it at all. Hope that helps! :)

Answered almost 8 years ago

Joe Robison

Founder and SEO consultant at Green Flag Digital

There are different ideas on this. Google read your page mainly through your HTML code, so if you view the source code of the page and the content is visible in text form, then you're in good shape.

There are different opinions on how much Google takes into account expanding accordion and tab-like structures where the content is hidden but also fairly accessible to the user.

Even though this is from 2014, it does state that there is a fair amount of discounting going on - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hidden-tab-content-seo-19489.html

Answered almost 8 years ago