Although the use of image maps can save time and effort in cases where a single image should link to more than one URL, image maps cannot be read by search engines. This means that any links in the image maps will not successfully be crawled by search engines. Where possible, we highly encourage the use of regular HTML links in place of image maps.
Here is a code example of an image map:
<MAP NAME="MyMap">
<AREA SHAPE="polygon" HREF="page1.htm" COORDS="26,185 238,185 238,216 55,216">
<AREA SHAPE="polygon" HREF="page2.htm" COORDS="76,238 355,238 355,271 109,271">
<AREA SHAPE="polygon" HREF="page3.htm" COORDS="131,294 395,294 395,330 171,330">
<AREA SHAPE="rect" HREF="page4.htm" COORDS="234,349 361,366">
</MAP>
Here is a code example of a regular HTML image link:
<a href="page.html" title="Link title Text"><img src="image.jpg" alt="Image ALT Text"></a>
