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PHP Dynamic Text Replacement and SEO

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by stephenmunday, Jan 26, 2007.

  1. #1
    I am having my company site redesigned. My web designer tells me the following about DTR, but I am wondering whether this is legit or not in the eyes of the search engines. Can someone technical confirm / deny this?

    This is what he told me:

    All of the images that you see on the site, except for the logo, will be what are called background images. They will then have text laid over top of them and this text will just be made transparent. So when a search engine comes to the site, it will completely ignore the background images and just read through all of the text. The FREE Trial badge, the navigation, the blurb, these will all be recognized as text. Now with the special font for the headlines, that will in fact render as an image but it's a method called DTR (Dynamic Text Replacement) which is one of two widely used methods for creating text using fonts that aren't web safe. Basically, what happens is your page loads completely and then a PHP file looks for any text that has a special piece of code attached to it and then it takes that text and creates an image out of it. But in the code itself, their are no images, and you're left with just the text. Search engines see it as just text, too.

    None of this is meant to "trick" search engines in any way and it's all 100% Web standards. It's just creative ways designers and developers have come up with to make websites look better.
     
    stephenmunday, Jan 26, 2007 IP
  2. Kalyse

    Kalyse Peon

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    #2
    Yeah I thnk google can delist you for this.
    Didnt some form of keword stuffing happen on BMW.de and google removed them from their index for a short while?

    But yeah basically, from what I know, dont do it.
     
    Kalyse, Jan 26, 2007 IP
  3. mines

    mines Well-Known Member

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    #3
    It is often used more for accessibility uses tbh. I use it. Doubt very much google will ban you, esp if the text is in the images anyway
     
    mines, Jan 26, 2007 IP
  4. oseymour

    oseymour Well-Known Member

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    #4
    please....do you honestly believe what you are saying?...You will get banned in a heartbeat if they find that....
     
    oseymour, Jan 26, 2007 IP
  5. mines

    mines Well-Known Member

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    #5
    No they won't.

    I've had many sites banned from google for doing less than white-hat seo. But none for doing this.

    It is a very common thing. Say i want to have an image that says "SECTION TITLE". I don't want to just put the image there, as screen readers etc can't see it. So i put a <h5> or whatever tag with the text in it, set the size of it to be the same as the image, hide the actual text (quite a few ways to do this) and set the background as the image. It won't get you banned unless it just looks like spam.
     
    mines, Jan 26, 2007 IP
  6. oseymour

    oseymour Well-Known Member

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    #6
    sorry I'm not following the crowd on this one
     
    oseymour, Jan 26, 2007 IP
  7. Kalyse

    Kalyse Peon

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    #7
    I think its bad.

    If you purposefully misdirect the user and separate what the SE see and what the end user sees, you may as well start a BH site, or cloak :)

    But hey.
     
    Kalyse, Jan 26, 2007 IP
  8. JEET

    JEET Notable Member

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    #8
    I don't know about search engines, but this is good for people on screen readers, although your designer could use simple ALT tags etc along with regular IMG also...

    What is the problem with IMG tag, specially if you want to display an image anyway? search rank manipulation I guess? ;) :) :D

    Until not detected, you will be fine, but google now has too many reporting tools, and you have competitors...
     
    JEET, Jan 26, 2007 IP
  9. stephenmunday

    stephenmunday Peon

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    #9
    I'm getting the impression that as long as the text seen by the search engine and the text that appears in the image are the same, there should be no problem as there has been no intent to mislead, unlike hiding text to put in lots of keyword spam.

    Thanks for the feedback!
     
    stephenmunday, Jan 26, 2007 IP