Does Google Dislike Slideshows?

[TMI.com]

I've noticed a recent drop in organic traffic and a slight dip in rankings. When I looked at who replaced us in the top spots, I noticed text heavy, in depth articles. We produce many articles in the slideshow format. Do you think this is the reason our rankings dropped?

[EGOL]

Instead of making "slideshows" I place all of my photos on a big single page with lots of generous captions.   Then when people land on those pages they say ... WOW!

Some of my big pages full of images are ranking well in google for very difficult queries.

A lot of people don't like slideshows because they have to click, wait, click, wait, click, wait.  I don't like them.  That's why I don't use them.

Google can see a slideshow as a whole page with one image and not a lot of text.  They might think that the purpose is to get visitors to click click click and display a lot of ads.  It would not be a surprise to see google judge a big page with twelve images and 1000 words as much more deserving of rankings than a single slideshow page.  That's why I don't see slideshows ranking above my big pages with a lot of images.  Plus, if you have a lot of pages like that on your website then you could have a panda problem for thin content.

[kimmiedawn]

Are your slideshows at the top of the page? Read this tweet (from the czar himself) which says there was a refresh Feb. 6th of the page layout algorithm. Cutts: https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/432940645200588800

It targets ads above the fold, but seems to indicate that lack of written content within easy viewing reach can also be undesirable.

Read more about the algorithm here: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html

Other possibilities may be that the text in your slideshows isn't html, or you don't have alt tags for the images, or the slideshow slows down the site, or that's all you really have for content on the site? Some slideshows are just not SEO-friendly, aside from algorithms and the case that they are generally not user-directed, and hence not user-friendly.

Good luck! Sounds like the the kind of haystack I find myself rummaging through as we speak;)

[JamesNorquay]

Upload slideshows on Slideshare.net Google loves the domain from what I have seen, if you have a great range of links to the Slideshare content you can have them ranking for great terms.

If you upload slideshow content to your own domain it may not be as effective.