I have removed a lot of text from my site and replaced it with images. My bounce rate has dropped considerably, conversions and time on site are up. Will Google have an issue with the lack of textual content on the site? Does Google still need text?
Danielroofer (aka Daniel Weadley), Camberley, Surrey, UK
Google Web Fonts:
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Yes! Visual content is good also, but it needs to have text on your website so people can find you in search results. Otherwise your bounce rate will drop and your blog will disappear on search results.
Google web fonts para SEO
What if Daniel follows Matts advice and uses more text to comprimise for Google's sake his ranking goes up but his time on site and conversions go down? If he reverts back then surely Google are going to be punishing him for making his visitors experience better.
I know image detection is extremely tough but we're always told to design our sites for our users but this contradicts everything Google are supposed to be encouraging us to do.
Are there any image detection ideas in the algo lab atm?
I have commented on videos
I have commented on videos
Was also wondering why Matt said it's a great question…
What about transcribing below the image what the image text reads?
Great question? Seriously Matt, how is that a great question?
It's about as bad a question as asking if Google still need bytes. lol
Idan, this is an excellent questions!
Doing some research, didn't find an answer yet.
If you will find, please post it here.
From my point of view – this was a great answer to the wrong question :-).
i believe the original question was regarding the ability of google to understand the content of a page, based no on OCR, but on image context.
can google crawl a page full of cat images, and understand that its topic is related to cats?
one problem with Google webfont is that there's not a single one supporting unicode symbols, for math, smiley, dingbats, tech symbols, etc. ↹ ⌫ ⌘ ✉ ★ ✡ ☭ ☯ ☢. Over the years, OS and browsers support more and more, but one can't use Google font to solve this.
I guess they read metadata in images and videos.
obviously, yes… otherwise they would have very little clue about what to look for in google images search.
But why would you do that and not just ad Alt text to the images. You could include exactly the same text as you throw off the page anyway.
Yes, they do. Matt mentions Alt Text in the video. 🙂
Does Google look into the image properties within the WordPress environment such as Title, Alt Text, Caption ?
Nice videos
google fonts suck
Very interesting and useful video. I'm writing about it on my blog.
From Google's Webmaster Guidelines: "Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text."
What about image replacement, taking text and throwing it off the page? As long as the text matches the image, technically not breaking any SEO rules.
Then you might have some problems with "cloaking". Because you can "text-indent" paragraphs of content and Googlebot can not figure out if you actually provide this content.
This is a great question and answear!
This is some piece of information 🙂 … Great8 video
I agree, this is slowing down something that could be beautiful thing, what is up with this problem~!
I understand why you recommend Google Webfonts, and it's not a horrible service…however, compared to FontSquirrel, it's got a very long way to go. You have much more selection with FS (including your own stuff!), you can host the fonts, and it's a lot more likely to work.
Mind you, this ultimately leads to a suggestion for Chrome…come up with a CSS property that will allow for fonts to be anti-aliased (or not), so that the text appears more or less uniform and as the designer(s) intended.
Does the text need to be on the page or can I write the content on a blog and post a backlink?
…but Google Chrome on Windows does not display all Google Webfonts in a correct way, some of them are looking horrible! Its a well known bug, reported under Issue No. 137692.
I prefer @font-face as long as there is no solution.
along with to CSS3
Which is the relation of DIGG with the Video?
I really don't understand.
Digg has been removed from the SERP result's !!
We run a pretty popular website and were using webfonts for a while. While on a slow connection I noticed it took some time to load these fonts and while loading the headers our the site were invisible. I removed webfonts and switched to a font stack that is supported by all devices and I noticed that our bounce rate dropped and time on site increased. I would recommend more webmasters to experiment with this kind of stuff. Do what's best for your visitors, even if it looks a little less pretty.
Web fonts are the best thing happened to web design in a long time!
What about SIFR? What about -9999px technique? What about 100%-text-indent&nowrap&overflow trick?