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Powerful quote regarding Google / Search Engine dependency!

We built a site with large images and pushed the H1 below as an experiment. We saw no downsides, and because the site was far more user-friendly and good looking (we didn't change any on page SEO really) we noticed visitors were bouncing less, browsing more, and converting almost 40% more.

Go for the user first!

Highly recommend avoiding this tactic then. This is a huge no-no.

4 to 8 weeks seems like ample time to me. Maybe I'm misreading the situation, but doesn't opensiteexplorer's recently discovered links show pages within 24 hours?

The text will still render to search engines and you should be fine. When we have a logo on a site that doesn't require text (except on mobile) we usually display: none; the text on higher resolutions yet Google and others still crawl the link. Our method is slightly different from you since our link is part of an image, as well, however.

That being said, if you are trying to hide text from users all together it seems a little shady / outdated and is a big no-no.

I've never heard of Google not indexing content inside of an

<aside>tag. Where did you hear that from? The aside tags are to identify related content, as you suggested.</aside>