Is this considered a dark pattern or black hat?
I'm working on a project where the client insists on keeping their carousel banners on homepage in place (despite all info/best practices to remove them for usability/accessibility/SEO concerns)
Making it even worse, however; is they are using these carousel banners to link to external marketing microsites. While its the same brand, style, visuals etc...the navigation, content etc..is completely different which will confuse users and prevent them from finding info they were looking for in the first place.
I'm trying to find some good arguments, rationale etc.. I can present them that goes beyond the standard usability arguments i normally would use. So my question is:
Would this be considered a dark pattern or black hat? Even better is there anything in Google algorithm and indexing rules that frowns on this kind of practice?