A recent post on Reddit asked about the impact of having a website where most of the text was within images. Would Google be able to read the text, what is the SEO impact and would the text rank in the search results?
This is a topic we have not covered in a long time so I figured I’d cover it again.
In short, if you want to do SEO right, make sure the text is on the page and not within an image. There are even some old-fashioned techniques, with new ways, to make sure the text looks like it might be in a graphic.
Worse case, you can use alt tags on images so Google can understand the image and the text in that image. Google used to allow image replacement text techniques, as well.
John Mueller from Google replied to that Reddit thread and said, “You could also be pragmatic – is it just the same text as you already have in text form (eg your company name & address), or is it actually something substantial that would be missing from your site if the images weren’t there?”
In short, if this is important text that is unique to that page – then you might want it to be real text and not an image.
Forum discussion at Reddit.
