Is text in images indexable by Google?

Does Google indexes the text in images on webpages? We were all taught that text in images is bad for SEO, because Google can’t index the text. However, having an Evernote Pro account makes me think differently now.

I upload all my screenshots to Evernote, because it can index the text in the image and make them searchable. Below is an example of doing a search for “receipt” in Evernote. Many of the results are screenshots with the found text highlighted in orange.

This search feature in Evernote is so amazing, that it makes me thing that Google can do the same thing.

Those Google guys are smart. They have to be indexing the text in images, and the public isn’t even aware of it. They are already doing OCR recognition with their huge book scanning project. And then you got Google Maps and how they are indexing all the addresses on buildings in their images.

If Google does index text in images, infographics and webcomics stand to get a huge help online. Certainly image-based items like infographics and webcomics make it very easy to share via social media like pinterest and twitter. But it’s a shame when you make an infographic and none of the text is indexed by search engines. You don’t want to repeat the text verbatim in your post, so you spend time rewriting all the text in the infographic, just so search engines can find that text.

You’d think Google would be smart enough now to recognize the text in images such as webcomics and infographics.

(This blog post was inspired and is in response to Shellie Argeanton’s “How to save images for web: avoiding page weight & image size bloat” on orbitmedia.com.)