Disabling a slider with content...is considered cloaking?

[ACann]

We have a slider on our site www.cannontrading.com, but the owner didn't like it, so I disabled it. And, each slider contains link & content as well. We had another SEO guy tell me it considered cloaking.  Is this True?  Please give feedbacks.

[spencerhjustice]

I just took a look. Did you just disable the javascript that slides through the images so it just shows the initial image?

It also looks like the sliders all images, which shouldn't be that big of a deal. If you're not hiding keywords I wouldn't worry about it.

[ACann]

Yes, I just disabled the javascript.  The slider was a big part of the design.

[GlobeRunner]

ACann, as long as you're not serving up content to the search engines separately than what the users see, there shouldn't be a problem. I could see if you disabled it just for the users and you still allow bots or search engine bots to crawl the content then that would be an issue. It sounds like you just disabled it for all visitors. So, then I don't see any issues.

[gfiorelli1]

Formally everything that can be seen just by the bots and not by the users, it is consider cloaking.

Be aware that toggled content sidebars or columns, if it is visible by the users after completed an action, is not considered cloaking.

So, in your case, if you are just showing one slide of a slidedeck with multiple slides, it could be considered cloaking.

Obviously, you should not freak out and, as Spencer wrote, understand what are you hiding.

If you're hiding images only with no crawlable text and without alt text, then you should not worry, also because those images are substantially invisible to the bots (they know they exists, but they doesn't any worded description of the photo).

Instead, if you are hiding text, maybe optimized seoed text... than it is much better to quit the slideshare and use just the image with text you really want to show to your users (and Googlebot).