Text links vs graphic links

Do you have to have text links on the page?

[johnnstacy1]

We built several sites recently in which the index page only contained graphic links to other pages, (ie about us, contact us, etc) I got to thinking about this and became concerned that Google may not be spidering sub pages unless they have a text link to follow. Is this true? I have noticed that my sub pages do have PR and that PR is just one less than the index page. Does that mean I don't need the text links?

[yowza]

I think it should follow them just fine. However, I think the anchor text would help you alot more than the alt text.

[treeline]

Some people turn off images for faster downloads. Text links are best for them, or at least good alt tags.

[The Cricketer]

The main horizontal navigation bar of one of my sites is image only. These images links to my main pages. I have found no reason to believe that this decreases spidering as there is still a perfectly normal <a href=""></a> surrounding the image.

The main issue is whether Google gives more priority to text links over alt. Again my site is doing fine with the alt links, even though in the past people have said alt is not as good.

The main pros for my image navigation is that it looks good and gives originality to my site. The main con is that they will take longer to load than a text link. But for me at the moment the aesthetics outweigh the slightly longer load time.

As for alt v text for Google, I personally have no reason to get rid of my alt images in favour of links. Having said that I have vertical text navigation down the left hand side which link only to my second level pages.

I suppose it is good practice to provide both forms of links on your pages, but I find no amazing advantages which one has over the other.

That's my view anyway.

[MikeBeverley]

I have worked with alt tags versus anchor text on a number of sites and have seen slight increases in ranking for using keyworded text to link to internal pages on small sites. The effect is increased the larger the site.
The more dramatic results have come from getting inbound anchor text links to the site over image/alt tagged links to the site from external sources.

Also, although Google does see alt tags and uses them as part of the keyword density check (in my opinion) I don't believe it attributes them to the linked-to page in the same it does anchor text.

[sem4u]

I would add some text links at the bottom of your pages as well. Seems to work well for me.

[dirty_marra]

On a similar theme can google follow links that are in drop down menus?

[MikeBeverley]

There have been reports of webmasters with dropdown menu's who claim to have had their pages spidered and indexed. Whether this is true or not I don't know. Googlebot is getting smarter and with Google's ever increasing greed for pages I wouldn't be suprised if they found a way around flash next ....

[jschmeez32]

What about image maps? I have read that spiders will not follow an image map.

[your_store]

In my opinion, Google will follow any *text* that takes the form of a url. Whether that text is in the source code or readable content doesn't matter. I've recently even had url's indexed that only appear as the display url in my Adwords.