Another miseducated SEO rears their ugly head and slanders a well-known development technique as well as a high-profile SEO, accusing both of being spam. Better yet, the well-known development technique of Image Replacement has been dubbed “poor man’s cloaking”.

Let’s start this post with some simple definitions for the benefit of our misinformed SEO:

Spam (for search engines)

Any of various methods to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, usually in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.

Cloaking

A black hat search engine optimisation (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users’ browser.

Image Replacement:

A method of enhancing a headline using a graphic while maintaining a semantic (meaningful) source code. The content code and the presentation code remain separate, and the presentation (the graphic file) is a visual representation of the structure (the HTML content code).

Alrighty, definitions out of the way. Let’s dive right into this one:

Apparently, there was an H1 tag that was visible only to users who have images and stylesheets disabled. That’s why regular users typically don’t see it.

That is exactly the point of this whole exercise. We are taking the link text, “Search Engine Land Home Page”, bumping it off the screen using an “off-left” CSS technique then replacing that area with a background image that visually represents the same idea.

Minus the “Home Page” text in the link, the graphic representation of this text is representing exactly the same thing.

How is this possibly to be considered:

manipulation of the search engines?

serving different content to the users browser?

spamming in any form?

While being able to improve the visual design of a website through graphic text, it still retains the HTML text in the code allowing optimisation for accessibility and search engines.

According to the above definitions, this hardly qualifies as cloaking. The screen readers and search engines are crawling what they always would, the HTML source code. The different content being presented here is being delivered to the visual user, not the users browser.

Search engines are not being served different content at all, the CSS is simply presenting the information in a different way to users who browse websites visually, and not those using a screen reading device or to a spider.

Let’s have a good think about the context in which we are hiding the text on this web page. Are we manipulating search engines rankings by hiding text? No, we are not.

Hiding text in this circumstance is increasing the usability of your web page by allowing it to be found easier by search engines (basic SEO principles) and allowing them to be accessible to non-visual users of the web.

One thing I can’t live with is sweeping statements in the SEO industry that contain no evidence to back them up. How can an article be published like this without any knowledge or inquiry into the actual development technique being used? This has been around for years…

Google are way smarter than this, so why not cut the smear campaign and spare us the SEO propaganda? Better yet, try this simple 30 Second Test and you might have saved yourself from having to write this article in the first place.