[Personal translation] image replacement and Google

Image replacement and Google

2008-05-05

A few weeks ago, on the New Orleans An Event Apart website, what Aaron Walter said caught my attention.

In his speech, when he discusses image replacement and its impact on performance, it is suggested that the white elephant may be considered by most designers who have used image replacement over the past five years, however, it is difficult to have assets with huge economic benefits-from Wikipedia. Here refer to SEO) Question: What does Google think about CSS image replacement? But What surprised me is that Google does not reject image replacement and you will not be punished for using image replacement.

Although I always believe this is true, I have never been given a definite answer. One assumption is that Google is rather smart (TRANSLATOR: This is good technology), and their algorithms can distinguish between keyword-filled text and plain content written by real people. For example, I often think about misuse of image replacement and loading of invisible keyword text, and whether the alt attribute of the keyword into the image, or even the meta tag, is the same. The final result seems to be the same in three cases: in addition, the invisible text on the page may affect Google's ranking, whatever method they use to detect keyword filling on the other two elements, it is equivalent to text hiding with CSS.

In fact, many of my sites that use image replacement technology run well under Google's ranking mechanism. I will not list more conclusive evidence. It turns out that Google will not punish a site simply because it uses image replacement technology. (Although I'm sure they have already punished many sites that use the mean SEO method .)

However, I have never heard of any licenses from Google. So I did some searches and invited Aaron to do some tracking (thanks to Aaron !), Here are some resources related to that conversation:

Hide text and links
The second item ("place text behind an image") precisely describes some image replacement techniques. Here we mention a potential untrusted behavior, followed by a warning of the consequences of improper use of it. However, further reading, the focus has shifted to improving accessibility and the reasons that may cause users of search engines or devices with disabilities to be unable to access some of the content you describe. This is a very accurate description of the intent hidden behind image replacement. The article also provides a simple way to determine the accessibility of your site: display the pages that you want visitors to see to Googlebot. Reasonable Use of image replacement will pass this test.

Best use of Flash

In the second part, we mentioned sIFR (TRANSLATOR: sIFR, that is, scalable Inman Flash Replacement, a Flash-based text Replacement technology that can replace any page font, even the fonts not available on the client .), A concept similar to CSS image replacement in ideology, sIFR is also prone to abuse. As it comes from Google's blog, sIFR seems to have been officially licensed. This article also mentions a principle similar to the previous article: display the same content for Googlebot (Google robot) and users. What does it mean?

Use Flash, images, and other non-text files

For more examples. Provides an optional scheme for non-capturing content, and advantages of using sIFR.

As a result, we seem to have a clear answer. It is undoubtedly safe to make the image truly represent the content it replaces and use CSS image Replacement Technology in a responsible way. Simply hiding text from users is not enough for your site to be punished by Google indexing.

(This article has also been translated into Russian)

I have a limited E language level. please correct me if you have any mistakes!

Reprinted! Please keep the following information. Thank you!

Address: http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2008/05/05/image_replac/

By Dave Shea

Http://www.cnblogs.com/shuz/archive/2010/01/27/1657291.html.

Translation: shuz