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I think its a good thing that they do allow this sort of use, because it appears to me that theyre doing this very thing on their own search results pages! If you refresh a search page, you can see what theyre hiding under their own logo:

(click to enlarge)

a text link pointing to their homepage.

Now, the interesting question Id have for the Google team about this would be: this is straightforward if the image itself contains text, but what would be allowable if the image doesnt contain text, but say, an image of a lion? Theres many different ways to express what that lion is from lion to tawny, golden-furred lion king.

Or, should we be assuming that images that are written over text and links are only allowable when the image contains text?

The Google Webmaster Tools contributor states that you could be using images ALT and TITLE attributes to essentially do the same thing. This is sorta funny, because one could say the same thing of Googles use of this on their own page " why are they doing it?

One immediately wonders how Google polices this, since theyre apparently not frowning upon pages drawing images over text/links in all cases. They can detect text written over images, but would they have every instance checked by a human? Or, are they using optical character recognition algos to automatically check the text within images against the text being hidden?

In any case, the fact that Google is doing this on their own site could be taken as more confirmation that they dont consider the technique to be bad in of itself " as long as the practice is conservative and the text/link just describes the text content within the image.

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