Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Replace Header Text With Image
-
I have a static website that I would like to retheme. I have the mockup, and its spliced. The website holds nice rankings right now, and I want to keep them in place. The one thing that will change with this new design is the header will no longer be text, but instead an image. Is there a way to ensure googlebot still sees the H1 tag header exactly how it is now but use an image for the header instead?
I dont want any blackhat tricks that will get me banned. Just wondering if there is a simple way to have googlebot see the header as text (not ALT img txt) so the site does not appear to have changed at all. (It hasnt, I only am changing the graphics and colors of background, and header image for better branding.
-
To achieve a balance between visual aesthetics and search engine interoperability, you could use a Javascript font renderer like cufon: http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/ - which will give you nice anti-aliasing.
Look at Google Fonts too - http://www.google.com/webfonts#ChoosePlace:select
I would redesign & work towards getting a H1 on there rather than working backwards
-
Egol is correct.
your redesign has a cost, the desision is yours, what is more important, the HI or the design, only you know that.
-
You just need to make sure that the search engines will see your site exactly as visitors would see it. Don't try and hide anything. And I agree, try and keep the H1 tag.
And to answer your original question, the search engines have come a long way in terms of sophistication, but they still do not do so well with interpreting graphics, cookies, or javascript. Just good 'ole text.
-
I can leave the H1 tag in, I just dont know where to put it. Its my header, and the website now is VERY ugly. Maybe I will just put the H1 in there above the image, and then use a negative margin. Is that allowed?
-
You are going to use different html mark-up for the image and the h1.
They are not equivalent.
If you use the image you can add alt text but that is not going to be the same as H1 - less effective in my opinion.
If you can't get H1 into your site any other way then loss of the H1 will be part of the cost of your redesign.
If this was my site I would not give up H1 for an artsy image.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google not Indexing images on CDN.
My URL is: https://bit.ly/2hWAApQ We have set up a CDN on our own domain: https://bit.ly/2KspW3C We have a main xml sitemap: https://bit.ly/2rd2jEb and https://bit.ly/2JMu7GB is one the sub sitemaps with images listed within. The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: https://bit.ly/2FAWJjk. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed. I ve followed all the steps and still none of the images are being indexed. My problem seems similar to this ticket https://bit.ly/2FzUnBl but however different because we don't have a separate image sitemap but instead have listed image urls within the sitemaps itself. Can anyone help please? I will promptly respond to any queries. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TNZ
Deepinder0 -
Problem with Yoast not seeing any of this website's text/content
Hi, My client has a new WordPress site http://www.londonavsolutions.co.uk/ and they have installed the Yoast Premium SEO plug-in. They are having issues with getting the lights to go green and the main problem is that on most pages Yoast does not see any words/content – although there are plenty of words on the pages. Other tools can see the words, however Yoast is struggling to find any and gives the following message:- Bad SEO score. The text contains 0 words. This is far below the recommended minimum of 300 words. Add more content that is relevant for the topic. Readability - You have far too little content. Please add some content to enable a good analysis. They have contacted the website developer who says that there is nothing wrong, but they are frustrated that they cannot use the Yoast tools themselves because of this issue, plus Yoast are offering no support with the issue. I hope that one of you guys has seen this problem before, or can spot a problem with the way the site has been built and can perhaps shed some light on the problem. I didn't build the site myself so won't be offended if you spot problems with it. Thanks in advance, Ben
Technical SEO | | bendyman0 -
Hosting images externally
In these days of CDNs does it matter for SEO whether images (and PDFs etc.) are hosted off-site? Does it make a difference if images hosted on Flickr, photobucket etc. Thanks
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110 -
CSS background image links bad for seo?
On one of the websites I manage SEO for, the developers are changing how our graphical links are coded. They're basically coding in such away where there is no anchor text and no alt tag, so for example: So there's no anchor nor alt context for Google's crawler. How badly will this affect SEO, or is it extremely minimal and I shouldn't worry about? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JimLynch0 -
How google crawls images and which url shows as source?
Hi, I noticed that some websites host their images to a different url than the one their actually website is hosted but in the end google link to the one that the site is hosted. Here is an example: This is a page of a hotel in booking.com: http://www.booking.com/hotel/us/harrah-s-caesars-palace.en-gb.html When I try a search for this hotel in google images it shows up one of the images of the slideshow. When I click on the image on Google search, if I choose the Visit Page button it links to the url above but the actual image is located in a totally different url: http://r-ec.bstatic.com/images/hotel/840x460/135/13526198.jpg My question is can you host your images to one site but show it to another site and in the end google will lead to the second one?
Technical SEO | | Tz_Seo0 -
Image Search
Hello Community, I have been reading and researching about image search and trying to find patterns within the results but unfortunately I could not get to a conclusion on 2 matters. Hopefully this community would have the answers I am searching for. 1) Watermarked Images (To remove or not to remove watermark from photos) I see a lot of confusion on this subject and am pretty much confused myself. Although it might be true that watermarked photos do not cause a punishment, it sure does not seem to help. At least in my industry and on a bunch of different random queries I have made, watermarked images are hard to come by on Google's images results. Usually the first results do not have any watermarks. I have read online that Google takes into account user behavior and most users prefer images with no watermark. But again, it is something "I have read online" so I don't have any proof. I would love to have further clarification and, if possible, a definite guide on how to improve my image results. 2) Multiple nested folders (Folder depth) Due to speed concerns our tech guys are using 1 image per folder and created a convoluted folder structure where the photos are actually 9 levels deep. Most of our competition and many small Wordpress blogs outrank us on Google images and on ALL INSTANCES I have checked, their photos are 3, 4 or 5 levels deep. Never inside 9 nested folders.
Technical SEO | | Koki.Mourao
So... A) Should I consider removing the watermark - which is not that intrusive but is visible?
B) Should I try to simplify the folder structure for my photos? Thank you0 -
Headers & Footers Count As Duplicate Content
I've read a lot of information about duplicate content across web pages and was interested in finding out about how that affected the header and footer of a website. A lot of my pages have a good amount of content, but there are some shorter articles on my website. Since my website has a header, footer, and sidebar that are static, could that hurt my ranking? My only concern is that sometimes there's more content in the header/footer/sidebar than the article itself since I have an extensive amount of navigation. Is there a way to define to Google what the header and footer is so that they don't consider it to be duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | CyberAlien0 -
Does anchor text penalty apply to internal links?
We already know that over optimsied anchor text for external will cause a penalty. But what about internal links? All of our blog posts include an advertisement linking sales pages. These links all use the exact same anchor text. Is linking to an internal page from so many other pages (blog posts) likely to trigger a penalty? Here is an example: http://www.designquotes.com.au/business-blog/four-ways-to-enhance-your-e-commerce-site-for-busy-shoppers/ This links to http://www.designquotes.com.au/web-design-quotes Many of the posts link to the same page using the anchor text "Compare Web Design Quotes from Local Designers."
Technical SEO | | designquotes0