Text-Indent vs Position for SEO

Question

What's the best way to hide a text element and replace it with an image while still maintaining good SEO. I've seen negative text-indent, but I prefer absolute positioning with negative top.

So what I'd like to know is which is better for SEO. Do most search engines consider text elements with negative top with absolute positioning; likewise for text-indent?

Answer 1

I would be very surprised if there was any difference. Search engines care about your content, they don't generally download your stylesheets, so all they would see is the markup which would be the same for both methods.

Image replacement is good for users and search engines, so as long as you're not doing it for the purpose of cloaking, you'll be fine.

Answer 2

I'm afraid the accepted answer isn't the case as far as actual communications from Google indicate (as frustrating as that is!). Take a look here:

http://luigimontanez.com/2010/stop-using-text-indent-css-trick/

and here:

http://maileohye.com/html-text-indent-not-messing-up-your-rankings/

The answers indicates that any CSS that seems to hide content from the user could be considered bad, simply because the techniques have been tainted by their use by black-hat SEOs. Though they are super handy for development (and kind of required when using CSS sprites effectively), it looks like there isn't a Google accepted best practise to address this. Yet....