Do links in SVG tags have a negative impact on SEO?

Question

Inspired from an answer on Stack Overflow, I've decided to use an inline SVG tag for a wordcloud I'm working on. I'll be using SVG to make the font-size dependent on the container height - which would not be possible with plain HTML and CSS, and I want to avoid JavaScript.

My wordcloud contains around 10 items, each of which is linked to a separate page on my website. As you can imagine, it's important that search engines follow them correctly and give them the same weight as they would to any other navigational link on the site.

I was wondering if this was the case. I found a related discussion in the MOZ forum, but seeing that it's four years old, things could have changed by now - especially since SVG is becoming more and more widespread.

Answer 1

This answer hugely depends on what you are expecting as an answer. Google has not, and will not, reveal exactly how much weight each element is worth, nor am I aware of any case study that has proven SVG as in-viable.

This answer is based on what we know and not what we hope

• Google loves responsive design :: SVG scales to any resolution :: GREAT!
• Google loves text content :: SVG supports text within an image :: GREAT!
• Google loves page speed :: SVG are super small and fast :: GREAT!
• Google understands SVG markup and a href links within :: GREAT!
• Google can read the DOM :: SVG's have a DOM :: GREAT!

With everything said above it should be clear that SVG is viable and should be promoted, it is unlikely that SVG will make a huge difference but could give you a little bit of an 'edge'. A word of caution would be that you should check how many visitors visit your site using browsers that do not support SVG, as it may be recommended you introduce a fall back before phasing it out completely.