Should I include my logo text using ‘alt’ or CSS?
please watch this video first :
now read this post :
Replacing H1 tags with Images .. ok
now the way that Matt laughed about CSS replacement made me feel uneasy, so I pinged Joost de Valk on instant messenger and he pointed out this google webmastercentral post which cleary shows Google replacing it’s logo with text. they even say
“Google search result with CSS disabled (“Google” sprited image lost, descriptive “Google” link remains)”
so who is right Matt Cutts or webmaster blog, because at the moment I feel very conflicting advice.
Dave
Aussiewebmaster 1426 days ago
http://www.empfx.comI thought it was becoming obvious that the rest of Google is keeping Matt in the dark. Must see him as the company’s Internal Affairs guy
Steven Morgan 1426 days ago
http://www.facebook.com/steven.morgan1Saw this video the other day and was equally confused – in terms of semantics your logo usually represents the “heading” on any homepage, in that respect claiming that alt text is an equivilant is clearly incorrect.
Annoying. Odd.
Suzy 1426 days ago
Hey Dave, I’d say they are both right, and that it’s two differing scenarios – if the LOGO image is hard coded into the HTML use the alt attribute, as that’s what it’s for.. if replacing an element with an image (not logo) replacement technique, as long as the text in the is the same or thereabouts as that in the image use CSS ..
One thing that should perhaps not being done and Google is not doing this, even replacing their “logo” and could be what Matt is getting at with the “laugh” there is no need for a company Logo to be inside an element, you can likely use it more wisely than that and keep that Logo as an image with its alt “tag”
H1 replacement is not the same as image replacement each have their value
Suzy 1426 days ago
^ “.. no need for a logo to be inside a [h1] element.. “sorry typed the tag out of habit and made it disappear
Esoos 1426 days ago
http://www.esoos.com/Thesis is set up by default this way: Your logo is wrapped in an H1. Matt Cutts’ blog uses Thesis. His logo is text, but I wonder how he would approach it if he wanted to use an image.
To leave it blank seems like a waste of an H1 header, and an empty H1 doesn’t seem like it’d be good for the site or the search engines. You can’t use alt text without doing a fair amount of customizations because the image is in the CSS, not the HTML.
So a lot of people go with pushing the text off the screen with CSS, which nobody seems to be entirely sure is cool or not, even though the text matches the logo. With Thesis getting so popular, there’s probably a lot of people looking for clarity on this.
Dave Dugdale 1426 days ago
http://www.pickrent.comI watch all of Matt’s videos and just about every time I know what he is going to say. I watch them because I don’t want to miss anything.
When I watched that video, I said oops, that’s not what I thought he was going to say. Sounds like you guys thought the same thing.
With the whole nofollow thing and this issue, lately it fills like Google is making are job more confusing.
Dave Dugdale
Amelia Vargo 1426 days ago
Can’t get the video.
Shark SEO 1425 days ago
http://sharkseo.comA lot of web designers use this technique instead of text replacement, it’s a fairly common thing. It’s a bit worrying that Matt Cutt’s is saying not to, as long as the text in the image and the text in the H1 tag are pretty much identical then it’s not deceptive.
Nick 1425 days ago
Couple of thoughts here:-
1.Why would you want to put a Company Name on every page? It’s not content specific and not useful for search engines – having it sitewide makes it ambiguous
2. I personally stay well clear of text replacement, and wouldn’t recommend it – as dave said in original post you should just build it into the design somewhere to uncomplicate things. I want to be able to sleep at night without worrying IF I might get reported/black marked for using a negative indent. With things like Cufon it’s becoming easier to style fonts/logos using css etc
3. I’ve recently also ‘borrowed’ an idea from Youtube’s site which was to code the homepage link logo into a element. It kind of makes markup sense to me, and so far no complaints.
Nick 1425 days ago
‘into an element’ should’ve read (button) element
Allan Stewart 1425 days ago
This is a clear contradiction and proff that even Google sometimes find it hard to make up their mind on best practice. Bad show Google. You want people to listen to you, you gotta make it clear what your policies are. Me for 1 would rather pay to use Google that have them collect my Data and Spam me with Adwords all the time (althought I doubt there are many others who would agree). There are so many contradictions in the Google business model. Personally I thought Matt Cutts alwasy did a good job at web master comms. Perhaps they should re-centralise becuase clearly they are having issues about consistency between communication channels. Bad news for the big G. Bad timing with Bing just right there too.
David Fairhurst 1425 days ago
http://www.intelligentretail.co.ukGoogle Webmaster Central is obviously wrong… pushing text off the page with CSS could be construed as masking… what if you were to put a large string of keywords in there? As ususal common sense should prevail and Matt Cutts is right, you should be using the ALT tag as that’s what it’s there for! Look at the W3 markup rules, they’re there for a good reason.
I would agree that there seems to be quite a bit of internal miscommunication going on at the big ‘G’ at the moment – perhaps they put the cleaning lady in charge of updating Webmaster Central?
richardbaxterseo 1425 days ago
http://seogadget.co.uk/Hi all.
Matt says (in about the first 10-15 seconds)
“It’s much better to use an alt tag rather than hiding things with CSS, you know like 9000 pixels over to the left”
We all know you can either have an alt tag on your logo or use a CSS class to place the logo (with or without an alt in the html). Certainly to me, Matt’s advising against doing anything beyond this (i.e positioning inside the CSS file to make the text in the logo appear off screen).
Just an opinion and I’m sure some may disagree with my interpretation of his comments. Either way we all know what works and what doesn’t (you’ve done the actual tests, right?) and CSS positioning off screen is about as daft as it gets…
Allan Stewart 1425 days ago
DaveF – LOL – I now have images of little old mavis with blue rinse hacking away at GWMC)
Anyone who clokes content deserves whatever they get but that is not the point! You don’t use a sledge hammer to crack a wallnut and I hope this is not what Matt is elluding too. If Matt could clear up Googles position on this it would be great.
Richard you are probably right, but untill the big man speakes I for 1 am not prepared to take the risk and so right next to CSS sprites in my company DEV list I have just put the sentance “PARK UNTILL BIG G DECIDE”
Esoos 1425 days ago
http://www.esoos.com/Nick makes a good point: Why would you want the same H1 header on every page? From that perspective, wrapping the logo in an H1 doesn’t make much sense. Make the H1 match the content of the page.
For Thesis, at least, that will require a bit of tweaking, but I suspect it’s worthwhile to do so. Some blogs (like Graywolf’s) look like they’ve gotten it right.
Richard Hearne 1425 days ago
http://www.redcardinal.ieI think the bit he’s warning about is the -9000px.
There are other much nicer ways to handle this. If memory serves me right, I’m pretty sure Googlers have mentioned that as long as the text you include exactly or closely mirrors the text in the image your good to go.
My guess is that using massive negative absolute positioning may wave a flag. Too many flags and you might have trouble.
Shout SEO 1422 days ago
http://www.shoutwebstrategy.com.auI think that using ALT is fine. I agree with Matt’s comments. I dont see what you need to hide it in CSS.
grasshopper 1421 days ago
i actually asked this message directly to maile ohye of google at a search developer event put on by vanessa fox and bing a couple of weeks back.
i started by differentiating between what i’ve always heard is legitimate CSS image replacement (e.g., Leahy/Langridge or the Shea Enhancement) and stuff that’s been abused historically (e.g., negative indent pushing the text way off the page).
i also explained that this would be used not to replace our company name across all pages, but an image that contains the product name on a specific URL, whicshould be an tag.
she gave the same advice that matt did. choosing between:
1) using CSS image replacement to create the and doing a verbatim transcription of the text in the image
and
2) wrapping the image in an and using the attribute
she was 100% in favor of the second option. she even made it sound like they were looking down on all forms of CSS image replacement as potentially suspect. didn’t make a bit of sense to me, but that’s what maile told me.
David Fairhurst 1420 days ago
http://www.intelligentretail.co.ukThere you go then… if what Maile Ohye / Matt Cutts says is Google official policy (and not what you’ll find on GWMC) then I for one will be advising against the use of H1 wrappers for company logos / negative placement with CSS …
Let’s face it, the use of an image to replace the H1 tag on any page just does not make sense anyway as the H1 tag is there as the lead marker to tell people (and search engines) what the page content is about… and negative placement of text is just plain dodgy.
Nice to see some common sense at the big ‘G’
Efusjon 1402 days ago
Matt Cutts is Moses for Google. Google needs to figure out if they are more interested in the user experience or fighting spammers.
Rob Flaherty 1226 days ago
http://www.ravelrumba.comI was doing some research on this and found this very recent thread in the Google webmaster forums. From John Mueller, Google employee:
“If you are using image replacement techniques, you must make sure that the text which is being replaced matches the image exactly. If you are replacing a logo with a long line of text, that would be considered deceptive.”
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=68770419e0e07822&hl=en