Welcome to the Q&A Forum

@doug

Thanks for the quick answer, I think that @caroline's point/question is also of main concern. I am happy to leave the links as long as I can dilute their (potentially negative) effects by gaining quality, authority links, but I would expect from the first Panda update, that backlinks from link farms/directories would carry no authority and therefore would have little to no effect on the website that they were linking to.

How do I go about getting rubbish backlinks on a clients websites removed? The links were created by a previous companies link building campaign, and I believe this (along with a few other things) could be the reason for their poor SERP's as they are an established website.

Can I alert Google and get them to discredit the links, or do I manually have to try to make contact with the owners/webmasters of the websites to get the links removed?

All help appreciated!

Thanks

Are there any hard stats anywhere regarding sIFR, Cufon or @Font-Face or even Google-Fonts now?

I would have expected that sIFR does have a negative impact on a website due to a number of factors:

1. Page speed, sIFR does load slower than the other font replacement techniques
2. User engagement, sIFR therefore h1/h2 tags etc will not be shown on mobile (iPhone/iPad) devices, if a user comes to a page and cannot see any primary headings, then surely you would see higher bounce/exit rates.
3. Similar to point 2, as you can't hyper link using sIFR, then potential primary CTA's might not work for users, again creating rubbish user engagement.

I'd be really interested in seeing others responses to this.

Hopefully I'm pitching to a new client within the next few weeks, and I will be advising that we change from sIFR to a more (what I believe to be) SEO friendly font replacement technique. If i do win them, I'll see what I can track and repost!