Are carousel-style link modules less crawlable?

Whether you are designing your own inlinks modules for your webpages or working with Graphite to design your Internal Links API modules, it is a common question to ask if you should be avoiding carousel-style module designs in favor of SEO.

Since carousel-style modules hide some of the links, does this make these modules less crawlable for Google and other bots to fully discover pages across your site?

Here's our thought process behind whether or not you should use carousel-style modules for linking on your website:

• Google will use the content on the mobile version for this, in general, we will collapse links on mobile

  • The version that matters the most is the mobile version

• If the links are server-side rendered, the crawler will probably pick up all of them (from the mobile version)

Given this information, it is likely fine to implement a carousel-style linking module on your website if this is your team's preferred design for your webpages.

Related guidance from Google on the topic:

Make sure that your mobile site contains the same content as your desktop site. If your mobile site has less content than your desktop site, consider updating your mobile site so that its primary content is equivalent to your desktop site. **_You can have a different design on mobile to maximize user experience (for example, moving content into accordions or tabs); just make sure that the content is equivalent to the desktop site, since almost all indexing on your site comes from the mobile site.

You can read more about Mobile-First Indexing Best Practices from Google here

Graphite Growth™