Hi there, Wondering if using css sprites will be negative SEO wise?. I am planning to use sprites for a horizontal menu. Any tips, info?
Background images, unless they contain your text, have nothing to do with SEO. The search engines never even see them. cheers, gary
Which is why HOW you implement them is important. If you make a bunch of empty anchors with a background on them, there's nothing for the search engines (or people browsing with images disabled) to even see.... You make them as actual text with the image as a background, or use an image replacement technique like gilder-levin they are treated no different than if they were just plain text. Remember, search engines really don't care about your CSS. Very few CSS properties do search engines even take time to notice - I believe visibility:hidden and display:none are the only ones that really factor in, and those only get paid attention to if they are in the html and not an external stylesheet (which is fine since you shouldn't be putting those in your HTML file in the first damned place). Same can be said for HTML attributes assuming you have valid markup. They don't care what way you are setting the 'align' or what 'color' you assign to a font - they care about the text and what tags are used. Which is why semantic markup is so important - since using the tags to say what things ARE (or are not! Not every element should have a P around it) not only helps for accessibility, it gives the search engine some clue what the text IS.