Google and ALT Tags
Written by Jeremy Luebke on January 8, 2007 – 8:38 pm -I read someone’s comment on a blog today stating they didn’t think ALT text meant much to Google. There is so much misinformation dealing with SEO it’s sometimes hard to tell the truth from the bull. The confusion usually stems from either old information still live on websites or just the fact that much of what we do is based on past experience. A lot of what I see on forums these days is the blind leading the blind.
While doing a site search on Google for Xuru.com you will find evidence that Google treats ALT text as nothing less than on page content. I used a template for Xuru.com and didn’t do much in the way of SEO to tell the truth. On my category pages where I did not add a description tag, Google is showing the top most content from the page since there are no keywords provided in the search box to center the search listing around. See where I highlighted in the first listing “balloon left slice right slice.” That is the ALT text for the balloons in the pager header. To me that is proof positive that the ALT text is content to Google.
Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization |
January 8th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Very interesting, I had never looked that closely or noticed.
However to play devils advocate - is it possible that google would read ALT tags, and display them in the description - but not give them any weight in the ranking algorithm?
January 8th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
What would be the point of that? That just wouldn’t make any sense. Sometimes the simplest answer, is just that, the answer.
January 8th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
Well the reason that many “claim” ALT tags are ignored is because they are often abused for keyword stuffing and done so with low chance of detection by the user.
Again just playing devils advocate, I don’t have any evidence to support one or the other.
January 8th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
You speak of the blind leading the blind. People can “claim” all they want, but I work and make a living off evidence & experience.
April 17th, 2008 at 8:32 am
Hey man,
Big G treats Title attributes on elements the same (on links etc).
Most semantic markup now seems to get indexed in some way.
April 18th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Wow, it took me a while to end up at this post. Nonetheless, i must comment.
We have a trademark for one of our products and noticed a competing page in the top 3 on G. After visiting the page, we could find ZERO references to our trademark name and I started thinking doorway page..
We got a little deeper into checking out the site and realized it wasn’t a doorway at all. It turned out that at one time the owner of the site had a listing for our product, which they had removed. However, one of the intoductory images on the site had an ALT tag that included the name of our trademark.
This was enough to bounce the listing into the top 10. Of course, the site in question is highly relevant for our industry and has quite a bit of popularity, but wow, i couldn’t believe the power of the ALT tag and the single reference to our trademarked name.
I shot an email to the owner and she promptly removed the ALT tag and we were good to go. The page dissappeared within a matter of 2 days.
In response to Ross, i am almost positive G is going to have a filter for keyword stuffing on ALT tags. i’d imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to detect.
I love alt tags. there’s a reason why you get an error when validating HTML 4.01 transitionals without adding ALT tags to every image. The computers can’t read them [images] yet, so they want us to tell them what it is.
MegaD
p.s. — jeremy, good to see your blog is up and running. last time i visited was when you had maybe 3 posts on here. rock on dude!