Are Carousels Bad for SEO?

[Kingalan1]

My real estate web site was migrated form Drupal to Wordpress last July. The ranking have dropped a lot since migration. One of the things we changed is that we have added two carousels to the home page. Most of the text is below the carousels. Is this bad for SEO?

Thanks,
Alan

[RobertFisher]

Alan,

When you say "carousel" do you mean a slider that has images that rotate through in a slideshow format? If so, they are not bad for SEO per se. Also having text below is not bad for SEO. Again, you need to realize that you are asking a question in a vacuum and if you give more data we might be able to help you decipher the problem.

The change from drupal to WP should not have a negative effect per se. A question is did the urls change? If they did, did you do 301 redirects in the .htaccess file on a url to url basis? (This is the more common problem I see with new clients who come to us with a problem after a site change.)

From a UI/UX perspective, how large is the slider relative to the page? How fast? Is there music? Etc. So, the devil is in the details. (Did you change from an IDX feed for your listings to RETS?) With a site change and rankings drop, you have to look first and foremost at what was changed and then use the process of elimination to ferret out the problem.

I hope this gives you at least a bit of insight,

Robert

[PatrickCoombe]

A lot of the time carousels can tack on lots of added bandwidth, both in the slider functionality as well as the images within the slider.  Site speed is a large factor within SEO and has been known to make a site respond accordingly.

You mentioned you switched CMS's as well:  did you pay attention to your permalink structure during the change?  Were any 404's created.  Did you 3xx old posts to the new ones? Sitemap?

All things worth looking ito.