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Update - Aug 18, 2008
DG pointed out that I should move my update to the top of the page on this one. I’ve done that. And, though I usually consider it bad form to go back and change posts to change the meaning, I’ve changed the post title on this one as well. I’ve left the url (far less important for how the search engines index) so anyone who may have bookmarked the post can still find it and for historical purposes.
Update - Aug 12, 2008
Please read Dan’s explanation of how this plugin actually works. I take it all back, well not the part about it being a “great design tool” 
and offer my apology to Dan and Cory. Thanks to Dan for stopping by and explaining what’s going on here and where before I’d give it a sideways thumb I’d now give this plugin a thumbs up.
Original post
If you run a blog and use WordPress and you’ve written a recent post, you may have seen in your dashboard a new WordPress plugin which on the face of it looks neat, but could be a real search engine optimization killer.
The suspect plugin is Facelift Image Replacement from 23Systems Web Design. What this plugin does is to change your text into images. Given the limited range of font recognition it’s easy to see why you might want to do this from a design perspective, but beware you might be sacrificing descent search engine rankings.
The problem is that search engines can’t read images so what looks like text to you and me doesn’t show up as anything but an image devoid of contextual meaning to a search engine. Search engines tend to assign even greater meaning to those very text elements such as headers that you’d be likely to apply FLIR to.
My hat off to the developer for a great design tool, but anyone contemplating using it should be very, very careful.
Just a quick note. First, thanks for the plug.
The JavaScript behind FLIR is by Cory Mawhorter. I am working with him to create the WordPress plugin - so all the really cool credit goes to him.
Also if you take a look at the source for a page that FLIR is running on you will see that you header tags are still there - which search engines will see. The image replacement takes place on the client side using JavaScript so no matter what happens - say JavaScript is turned off - you still get your page. for example I have FLIR running on 23Systems and it will render images for the header
andbut if you look at the source you will see (and so should search engines this:23Systems Web Devsign
Custom website design and development
So it shouldn’t impact your SEO even is the search engines are rendering the JavaScript.
Ugh… well the code tags didn’t work out very well in my last comment.
That’s pretty cold-hearted of you to leave this post up.
You put the entire “I’m sorry” at the end, after a long explanation of how bad this plugin is.
You should put the “I’m sorry this post was wrong” at the BEGINNING of the post, so that all the new people stumbling on this post when searching for the cool plugin won’t get the wrong impression from the dis you posted.
@DG
Point well taken, except the cold-hearted part.