: Do search engines index and rank text content in external SVG files (not inline) I am under the impression that Google and other search engines understand the text content within SVG, however...

@Heady270

Google does not appear to index text in .svg image files.

I have created an SEO experiment for you. I:


put three paragraphs of text in an SVG image
saved that as a .svg file
embedded the image in a new web page using <img src=
waited a week to see what Google indexed


Google did not index the text in the image at all. The text on the new page itself is indexed just fine.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Jamie184

If your talking about Google the short answer will be yes, but not by the format but the size of the file or embed code that will make your site faster. An SVG if it is not very complex has much less size than an image, and this will reward you in search engines.

Vote Up Vote Down