Web fonts & SEO
-
Hi everyone !
My question is regarding web fonts. We are currently working on a new design for our website and we're thinking about using web fonts instead of images containing the fonts we'd like to have.
I'd like to know if web fonts can affect SEO as they need to be downloaded on the visitor's computers and consequently can slow down the load time of our web pages.
If anyone has used web fonts in the past, do you have some specific tips to share ?
Thank you in advance for your answers!
Jeremie
-
It's probably a bit of a balancing act. The advantage of using web fonts is that it makes the text that you would have "hidden" in images accessible - goof thing for SEO if the text includes keywords and/or describes the content.
As you say, the downside is the additional load time. This depends on the particular font and of course where it's hosted. I've used the google hosted fonts on a project and not had any significant problems with speed.
Speed can be a red herring though as you would have had to download the images before. If you're replacing lots of images with web fonts then you may actually be delivering fewer bytes.
Perception can be different though as the browser has to download the font before it can render the text.
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
-
Feefo customer reviews for SEO
Hey Guys, I'm not overly techy, but, I need to advise on Feefo integration. I have been reading and it seems that https://support.feefo.com/support/solutions/articles/8000042161-full-integration-javascript-on-page this is the best integration method. Do you guys have any pointers with using Feefo? Are we still good to use intermediaries like this to handle our reviews for us? Thanks in advance for any help. Kay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eLab_London0 -
Hiring SEO Management Firm. Budget & References
Hello, Need advise on outsourcing SEO What could be a likely budget to hire an International company of repute. Full time Contract of Outsourcing for 6 months - and to extension terms Primarily looking for social & off page reputation and ofcourse higher SERP positions Which would be the best renowned companies and what could be likely spending which can be xpected out of it. Pls advise only if a company is known for organic & ethical with a strong reputation build up.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Business Listing sites SEO
How websites like justdial, askme, indiamart, tradeindia do their search engine optimization? Is it different from normal seo? please help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Affiliate & canonicals
Hi, any help with this one would be great.... www.example.com sells widgets online. They are also promoted on a 3rd party website www.partner.com. Currently www.partner.com links to a page on www.example.com that is completely branded with the 'partners' design, style and unique copy (you would think you were still on 'partner' website). I saw this interesting article from 2011: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-seo-value-from-your-affiliate-links (in particular idea 1) Do you think adding a rel=canonical on www.example.com's partner page is still safe? All the best & thank you, Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Richard5550 -
SEO for eCommerce?
I'm working on a game plan for the on-page optimization for a growing e-commerce site (https://www.boutine.com) and I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with similar projects. Specifically, how to get the most SEO value out of product and category pages. Thanks in advance! -Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boutine0 -
How to Build High Quality eCommerce Web Site during Low Quality Web Pages?
Today, I was reading Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: More guidance on building high-quality sites. I found one interesting statement over there. Low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings. Why should I like to discuss on this topic? Because, I have made big change on my website via narrow by search. I want to give specific result to know more about it. This is my category page: http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas Left narrow by search section is creating accurate page for specific attribute products. California Umbrella:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas/shopby/manufacturer-california-umbrella From above page following page is accessible. http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas/shopby/canopy-shape-search-octagonal/manufacturer-california-umbrella Sunbrella Patio Umbrellas:
http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas/shopby/canopy-fabric-search-sunbrella Similar story for this page. Following page can accessible from above page. http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas/shopby/canopy-fabric-search-sunbrella/finish-search-wood My website have 100+ categories, 11,000 products. I have checked indexed pages in Google for my website. https://www.google.com/search?q=info%3Awww.vistastores.com&pws=0&gl=US#hl=en&safe=off&pws=0&gl=US&q=site:www.vistastores.com&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=910893d99351c8f7&biw=1366&bih=547 It shows me 35,000+ crawled pages which are developed by left navigation section. So, Will it consider as low quality pages? I want to improve my website performance without delete these pages.0 -
Subdomains and SEO - Should we redirect to subfolder?
A new client has mainsite.com and a large numer of city specific sub domains i.e. albany.mainsite.com. I think that these subdomains would actually work better as subfolders i.e mainsite.com/albany rather than albany.mainsite.com. The majority of links on the subdomains link to the main site anyway i.e. mainsite.com/contactus rather than albany.mainsite.com/contactus. Having mostly main domain links on a subdomain doesnt seem like clever link architecture to me and maybe even spammy. Im not overly familiar with redirecting subdomains to subfolders. If we go the route of 301'ing subdomains to subfolders any advice/warnings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
Anyone Experimented With YouTube SEO?
Primarily questions I want to know definitive answers to: Do incoming links to a YouTube video affect Google's decision to show a YouTube video thumbnail in the results? If so, does YouTube rank the video higher due to incoming links? Does YouTube take any off-page factors into consideration when ranking a video? Does anyone else have any other helpful tips/thoughts/suggestions? Please don't answer this just to get points and give me fluff information. I'd really like to get some concrete data/info 🙂 Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alhallinan0