The whole topic of image replacement and SEO has been bothering me a bit lately. Most SEO professionals are not necessarily technical, or if they are, they are not really dwelling too much on the issue. Which means a lot of the information about this topic is not well researched and just spreads a lot of untruths around the SEO industry.

Google recently changed their Webmaster Guidelines to further confuse the issues on what they regard as cloaking or hidden text. They have also gone on to recommend best practice methods of providing alternate content for webmasters which I find quite meddling for a search engine to be concentrating on such issues.

I wrote an article for YOUmoz about some of these issues titled, Cloaking vs Image Replacement: Hiding Text is Not a Bad Thing. Have a read, vote for it or feel free to comment on either blog as I feel this is an issue that still needs a bit of feedback from the development community.