CSS background image links bad for seo?

[JimLynch]

On one of the websites I manage SEO for, the developers are changing how our graphical links are coded. They're basically coding in such away where there is no anchor text and no alt tag, so for example:

So there's no anchor nor alt context for Google's crawler.

How badly will this affect SEO, or is it extremely minimal and I shouldn't worry about? Thanks in advance.

[DirkC]

Are you getting a lot of traffic from image search? Are these specific images worth finding (not just generic stock photo's)?

If not - it probably doesn't really matter. Is there a specific reason why they are doing this? Seems a bit odd for normal images (as it's mixing styling with HTML) - most of the time this is done for background images.

Dirk

[JimLynch]

We don't get a ton from image search and the images themselves aren't worth finding.

The developers are coding like this for sitespeed reasons (I'd agree with it being "odd"). Thanks.