@font-face, google fonts and SEO — Checklist

drywall_dan

Someone I know claims that search engines like Google have trouble with fonts that aren't the old standard fonts of yesteryear, resulting in pages not getting parsed by search spiders, and that to be on the safe side SEO wise I should stick with the standbys like Arial. A quick google search for 'search engines can't read fonts' yielded zilch. Do search engine spiders actually ignore text formatted with fonts they do not recognize?

Originally asked by huzzah on Stack Exchange (webmasters) (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Variant 4935.

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

Yes and no, he's conflating two different things. In late 90's/early 2000's, when designers needed to use fonts for design reasons, they embedded graphics files in HTML pages. Search engines cannot understand these, nor can the screen readers used by blind and partially sighted people. This is because the only HTML code in the page for a menu link, for example, would be something like <div><a href="#"><img src="menu-title.gif" /></a></div> which is meaningless to a robot that at the time could only decipher plain old HTML, ignoring the CSS and tags. The fix in that era was to write the code like this <div><a href="#"><img src="menu-title.gif" /><span class="text-indent">Menu...

Full answer by toomanyairmiles: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/29580 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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