How does Cufon affect SEO and Search Bots? [closed]

Question

I've been searching the web and can't find an answer to the question of how using Cufon affects SEO (the way bots from Google, Bing, Yahoo... read the page). I know the original text is still there, but it is inside a tag, inside a tag, and is next to a tag (instead of next to the word that should be next to it). In other words, do the search bots read "search by", the same way they'd read the cufon generated html below?

<cufon class="cufon cufon-canvas" alt="search" style="width: 72px;
height: 28.1667px;">
<canvas width="95" height="28" style="width: 95px; height: 28px; top:
0px; left: -5px;"/>
<cufontext>search</cufontext>
</cufon>
<cufon class="cufon cufon-canvas" alt=" by:" style="width: 36px;
height: 28.1667px;">
<canvas width="68" height="28" style="width: 68px; height: 28px; top:
0px; left: -5px;"/>
<cufontext> by:</cufontext>
</cufon>

I really like cufon since I'm not much of a graphics guy, but I also don't want to ruin any good SEO I've got going.

Thanks in advance for any help or advice, Chuck Foster

Answer 1

Cufon does not affect SEO at all. Its rendering engine is written in Javascript, and search engines don't read Javascript.

The code snippet you posted is what HTML looks like in your browser after Cufon has done its job; the search engines will only see your original html (the one you view when you click on View > Page Source in Firefox for instance).

Answer 2

A handy tip I learned while reading up on Google SEO is to take a look at your page in a text-viewer to give you a sense of what's visible to Google. You can do that with this handy tool: http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php Notice how your cufon shows up just fine.

Answer 3

Theoretically Cufon shouldn't affect search rankings as it is rendered after the page loads by Javascript. The actual source code still contains the heading. Despite this 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: Cufon SEO Effects

The study finds that Cufon doesn't have any direct effect on search rankings, although you could argue that the marginal increase in a page load time on a site that includes the Cufon Javascript file could potentially affect rankings, although in my opinion this difference would be minor.