SEO and Text Indent

[suarve]

Hi,

Have been having a read around about this and no one can make their mind up if it's good or bad. What are your opinions on using text-index -9999px for heading tags.

Ta

 

[suarve]

Well I have a design whereby the page heading are images, written in a very non standard fint - using a web safe font would bugger up the overall look/feel of the design.

 

[suarve]

Thanks for replies. Aftera bit more reading, think I'll leave the images and add a subtle (but visible) h1 to each page.

While I'm on the topic of SEO, what's your opinion of this - personally seems a little black hat to me.

Have been looking through a few competitor sites where I work and there seems to be a bit of trend lately.

You'll have your main website with a page about Web Design, with the onbvious keywords web design in the title and h1 tags. Then in the footer you have links as follows (links go to a renamed page E.g. web_design_location1.html):

Web Design Location1 | Web Design Location2 | Web Design Location3

Each of these links goes to to the same main web design page but with the h1 and title tags adjusted (E.g. Web Design Location1) - basically the same page as the main page describing yoir web services.

The weird thing is, is that the companies in question ranks quite well for terms likeWeb Design Location1.

Again, I won't be doing this for our company site as it seems fairly underhand, but whar are your opinions on it?





EDIT:
Have just come across another competitor's site. They have a list of about 250 (at the very least) uk regions/areas all linking to the name page, with a different querystring E.g.

Kent Web Design (links to: web_design.php?area=kent)
Essex Web Design (links to: web_design.php?area=essex)
Devon Web Design (links to: web_design.php?area=devon)

These pages are not mentioned anywhere on the site aprt from the site map, where this huge list of place names resides.

 

[suarve]

i don't like it but as you say it seems to work

examples all made by BT
http://www.cleanersregister.com/Guildford minus mine, green clean, and key services.

i don't understand what it is that makes those sites so much better from just putting that text there. they all pretty much rank somewhere on the first page for most keyword searches in my areas,

Well that's kind of a directory style site, so it's to be expected there imo.

The example I used is a competitor web company with hindreds of location name + keywords in their sitemap. E.g.

Web Design Surrey
Web Design Essex etc etc.