Does Font Awesome's suggestion to use <i> tags affect SEO?

Question

We use Font Awesome for most of our sites and in the examples it is suggested to use an <i> tag in the interests of "brevity" (it does also point out that <span> tag are the correct way of doing things, and I tend to agree).

I was curious as to whether or not this could have an impact on SEO. I am aware that validators (such as Nibbler) will throw up an error for the use of these tags, but I'm not sure if these warnings are anything to be concerned over or not.

Answer 1

I use Font Awesome on my sites and I wondered the same thing as well. Upon research, I discovered that using Font Awesome does not impact your SEO ranking or results. I have also run experiments and haven't noticed any change in SEO ranking upon using Font Awesome vs. plain CSS. No need to concern yourself!