Do spiders and bots read text behind ALT tags?

[nerdychemist]

I would like to place my company mission statement behind my company logo on the index page.

Doing so will mean that anyone browsing the site will be able to read the mission statement when they pass the mouse arrow over the company logo.

Does anyone know if google, yahoo, and msn bots and spiders will still be able to read the mission statement even if it is enclosed behind an ALT tag.

Thanks

[shri]

They do read the alt tag but it tends to have limited positive effect.

One thing I'd be concerned about is putting that on every page of site site, could trigger some duplicate content issues if the first thing the search spider sees is the alt'ed mission statement -- specially on pages which might not have a lot of content.

[phranque]

you might also want to consider what your site looks like with images turned off.
you can do this in firefox easily and i'm sure it's possible in ie although i haven't tried this recently.
i find the lynx browser very useful for viewing/testing sites as text-only since it screens out javascript, media content and other visual tricks.
this will show essentially what you look like to a bot...