Is text-indent: -9999px a bad technique for replacing text with images, and what are the alternatives?

Question

This article say we should avoid using this technique. This one says it\'s awesome. Is it true that Google looks inside CSS files for text-indent: -9999px; and

Answer 1

The text indent trick should be OK for action buttons, and perhaps not so OK if you want search engines to consider the link text while weighing the page rank of target page.

By the way I strongly believe Google will use multiple heuristics before considering your markup as SPAM so you should get away with using text-indent casually.