Hello, I have seen a lot of sites using graphics buttons as links. Even flash and other stuff for links. But using these things mean that you are losing out on Anchor Text for the links. Doesn't it dilute the power of the link? Whats you guys comment on this? Graphics links or not. Also support your comments with reasons. Thanks.
If you have a graphic as a link the engine will not be able to follow the link. Before a lot of people would put a html version above flash however Google now state that this would be considered cloaking, in Googles guidelines "Some examples of cloaking include: Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users."
hii if it would have been good, all SEOs would have done the same thing, giving links in flashes since while crawling images, crawlers are not able to see the link contained in flashes, so no use of it.
If you're using an image with proper alt="" text, then yes, the links will be diluted since plain text is far better than alternate text to begin with. As for Flash, no, those links won't be devalued since they won't even be recognized at all. If you're going to use a graphic for a link, mark it up as a regular text link, slap a SPAN inside it, and apply the image as a background to the span before putting the span over the text. Like how Paul O'Brien does it with his menu link example here: http://www.pmob.co.uk/temp/navimagereplace.htm