I hear you now – I’m SOOOO wrong on this, right? Cufon is a standard compliant javascript file with failback support – It MUSN’T affect SEO at all! The previous means – that even in browsers (or robots) that do not support cufon, the text will be seen just as text – index-able plain text! This text will get weighted and indexed just like any other text on the internet. So I’m an idiot and wrong – right? Not exactly.
So then how does cufon affect SEO? Well now that google has released “instant preview”, cufon font is not being rendered in the images. Some suggest it is a problem with google’s bot. Regardless, this is an issue for YOUR cufon website! Your image can come up completely incomplete in the preview pane.
I will use Katy Perry’s website as an example. Just look below at the highlighted sections that use Cufon and see how cufon is missing completely:
did you find a work around for this?
No, not yet! If you find something….please PLEASE email me back!
Hi,
Regarding your example of Katy Perry’s site, it does not seem to use cufontext, to stress what the text should be – I have previewed a few other sites, that use both and ALT text, where the cufon seems to display just fine…
Could this be the issue, that Katy Perry’s site just doesn’t use an optimal cufon implementation, SEO wise – or is it in your opinion a much more general problem?
Hey,
Any word on this? I’m REALLY curious.. all the ego-heavy coders on the rest of the forums are just giving flippant yes/no answers which tend to be totally uninformed. Yes Google recommends using a text browser to look at your site, but GoogleBot also is capable of interpreting JavaScript.. what are the implications for Cufon.. WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONNNNNNSSSSS..
SDO
That’s interesting about the Instant Preview not showing Cufon text. As it’s Javascript based I would also have assumed Cufon didn’t affect SEO – perhaps Instant Preview is trying to render the code, rather than just reading the source code.
I found that there were quite a few conflicting opinions about the search-friendliness of Cufon so I’ve done a small study to try and get some data on whether it does actually affect rankings, here it is: http://www.aerodesigns.co.uk/blog/negative-seo-effects-of-cufon/
Wow, I have always had a hunch that Cufon was not exactly GREAT for search engine optimization. To me if the text is not selectable or can’t be ‘found’ using the Edit > Find tools in a web browser, it may be more difficult for the search engines to read. However, I have never noticed that sites using Cufon in their headings do not have this text appear in the Google preview of their site. Alot of sites lately I’ve noticed have taken things a step further and are using cufon not only for headings but for regular body text as well! Needless to say, I find that alot of these are ‘there is no google pagerank for this page’ pages.
I do not agree with this. What you see is that the render engine does not work well.
Very complicated to check if it could affect SEO but it shouldn’t. Google would have said it.
I found through my experience that there is no “negative seo” effect in cufon..