Responsible Image Replacement Won’t Get You Banned From Google
One of the most popular ways to get around an age-old web developer problem — the lack of font choices in web design — is to replace text with an image using CSS. However the technique has some downsides, if you don’t do it right there are accessibility issues and it’s never been entirely clear how Google spiders view image replacement.
Although Google has never explicitly said image replacement is bad, it’s a technique that’s ripe for abuse. Unscrupulous SEO companies routinely use image replacement to stuff pages full of keywords for search engine spiders while showing images to human viewers. That’s exactly the sort of thing that will get your site banned from Google’s index, but what if you’re using image replacement for legitimate ends?
As designer and blogger Dave Shea recently discovered, Google seems to be okay with image replacement and, perhaps more exciting for designers, Google gives sIFR the thumbs up as well.
Shea writes:
So it appears that, short of a set of stone tablets carried down from the hills of Mountain View, we do have a fairly clear answer. Using CSS image replacement in a responsible way, where the image truthfully represents the content it’s replacing, is safe to use. The simple act of hiding text from users is not enough to get your site banned from Google’s index.
Shea’s conclusion comes from a number of Google webmaster documents including one on hidden text and links, one on the best uses of Flash and one on working with non-text files.
The key theme in all three article is that, so long as you present the same content with the image replacement as the text you’re hiding, you should be okay. Naturally if you use CSS to hide your fifty links to Viagra spam sites and display an LOLcats image to users you’re probably going to end up in Google index hell. However, when used responsibly, Google seems to be okay with image replacement, which should be good news for web designers who’ve hesitated to use it for fear of incurring Google’s wrath.
[via Jeff Croft]
