Notice that the linked google employee(<a href="http://maileohye.com/html-text-indent-not-messing-up-your-rankings/" rel="nofollow">http://maileohye.com/html-text-indent-not-messing-up-your-ra...</a>) has no real solution. Everything is still in development. Though if your site layout is conducive Google's search results are a good alternative (They still don't use the alt property).<p>While the text-indent css is a hack. For now it is the best we have. The alt property will get you in the search index, it will not allow for good display when google returns a result. That little snippet of each site that google shows is hard to get right using just alt text.<p>We should be moving away from using it, however right now almost everyone uses it. Google won't penalize you for it yet.