Bigdaddy likes image hyperlinks?

Has anyone seen how bigdaddy is treating image hyperlinks?

[Onders]

One of the sites I manage is quite old, and most of the internal linking has been done through images and Google used to have a bit of a problem with it.. and although I heard that Bigdaddy would be overcoming this problem I've not seen much evidence of it. Has anyone experienced any changes or know how bigdaddy is treating hyperlinked images?

[tedster]

I see no obvious changes so far. But I avoid having an image hyperlink as the only click path to an important page, so I might not notice. What are you noticing now, and what did you see in the past?

[Need More Hits]

Just checked my logs "Googlebot-Image" crawling my sites heavy (is this one new?)
No difference in traffic though.

[Onders]

Tedster - in the past I used to find that google did not crawl all the pages on my site, especially ones linked (through image hyperlinks) directly off the homepage. I was hoping that in the last couple of months this would have changed - but it hasn't.
You say that you avoid just having image hyperlinks to an important page, do you use a sitemap extensively or do you just place textlinks elsewhere?

Need more hits - are you finding that more pages have been indexed or were all your pages being spediered anyway?

In the long run I'm sure Google will be able to deal with this issue perfectly, but question is - is it worth risking my google ranking when they may not have perfected the way they do it yet?

[tedster]

do you use a sitemap extensively or do you just place textlinks elsewhere?

I use text links -- in fact for some time now, I use text menus that are lists instead of menus made of images. When it's practical, I also use a sitemap page or section, but I've found that text menus and links in the content section are the surest road to crawlability. Text menus with css hover effects are a lot better, IMO than images with rollovers.

Some clients really have a thing about using images for their menu -- and in those cases well chosen footer text links become essential. However, I always have a footer navigtation section for long pages anyway as a usability enhancement. A breadcrumb trail is another crawlability enhancement that works well for some sites.

[phantombookman]

Alt text now makes a difference when used in conjunction with a hyperlinked image

[Onders]

2 options:
a) a text link
OR
b) a combination of image hyperlinks with alt tags plus footer text links and maybe a breadcrumb trail... plus a good sitemap of course!
I'm hoping the latter option will be almost as good as the former!

[nippi]

gogole is more likely to crawl the links further up the page.

if i need to do footer links, i have them appear at the top of the html, though at the bottom of the apge.

wroks better