Do search engines index and rank text content in external SVG files (not inline)

Question

I am under the impression that Google and other search engines understand the text content within SVG, however... I unable to find a source that indicates that Google rewards the content found in SVG when using embed and not inline, e.g <img> and not <svg>.

Does Google and other search engines reward for text content found within a SVG when the file is external and not inline.

Google doesn't index text from iframes to the page that contains them, so I doubt they would do so with SVG images either. — Stephen Ostermiller, Jul 24 '15 at 17:56
How is this different than this question? I am interested in knowing as well. — posfan12, May 16 '18 at 02:42

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 30 '15 at 15:28

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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.

answered Jul 30 '15 at 15:28

Stephen Ostermiller

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I'll leave the experiment up for a bit longer to see if anything changes, but I doubt it will. My site usually gets indexed very quickly. – Stephen Ostermiller Jul 30 '15 at 15:29
Did you check whether the SVG could be "better found" in the image search? That's where I would imagine Google would end up using such text. – Alexis Wilke Feb 16 '19 at 22:56
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I could not find the image through image search using the text in the image. – Stephen Ostermiller Feb 17 '19 at 12:04

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 25 '15 at 08:51

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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.

edited Apr 25 '15 at 08:51

Simon Hayter

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answered Apr 24 '15 at 17:08

AlbertoFdzM

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Sorry but this wasn't what I asked. I'm aware of the benefits for speeding up page render times. SVG support text content, the question is whether or not Google reads that information when its not used inline. If at all possible please quote sources or other evidence. – Simon Hayter Apr 25 '15 at 08:54

Do search engines index and rank text content in external SVG files (not inline)

2 Answers2