A tag with only a background image

how should I do this and make it search engine friendly

[punisa]

I have a page where you choose categories by clicking on some icons in the menu.
The code looks like this:

<a class="iconslcn" title="Details on this product" href="/mypage/selectedproduct.html" style="background-image:url(/mypage/images/'.$row['icon'].'.png)">&nbsp;</a>

As you can see I must use inline styling because the icon is dynamically selected from the DB.

I style my a tag in CSS by defining it as block and adding fixed width n height, everything looks very nice.
My only worries are how will the search engines respond to this..

I DO have extra textual links to the same categories below which are exactly what search engines need:

<a title="Details on this product" href="/mypage/selectedproduct.html">Link to this product</a>

POTENTIAL PROBLEMS:
- I have double links that lead to the same page
- first one is only graphical background and " "

All comments are very welcome : )

[agerhart]

Doesn't seem like a problem to me.

You could place a rel="nofollow" on the links within the icon menu which would eliminate the dupe problem and leave the footer links as the only followed links to the product pages.

[punisa]

Thanks for the tip agerhart : D
Regarding rel="nofollow", I'm always scared of that code, lol : ))

Is it really bad if search engine realizes that there are two different links going to a same page?
Hmm.. I believe I have such situations all over my site, I don't really think I can fix them all.

For example, an article container box:
----start of article box----
> headline (link to article.html)
> image
> description
> "read more" button (link to article.html)
----end of article box----

I use like 10 of these "boxes" on my front page, currently they all have doubled links as it shows.

Hmm.. I created another web site years ago which used same approach and I didn't notice any major problems with SEO, or maybe there were : ))

[agerhart]

Regarding rel="nofollow", I'm always scared of that code, lol : ))

No need to be afraid of it. ;)

Is it really bad if search engine realizes that there are two different links going to a same page?

No, it's not bad, not at all. We have the same article boxes on most of our sites.

Think of it like this: your page starts out with 100 points of juice (I made that number up) and it will get evenly divided (maybe) among the links on the page. So as the number of total links on the page climbs the amount of juice distributed to each link decreases.

This is why some people will place a rel="nofollow" tag on their TOS, privacy policy, about us, and other non-important footer links. The same logic could be applied to multiple links pointing to the same page. You could pick the link with the best anchor text and place a rel="nofollow" on the rest.