Cloaking - using images on spider pages

[Canton]

Since traditionally engines have indexed text on a page and nothing else, it would stand to reason that pages that are fed only to spiders should just have text on them and no images. I know that Google and some others now read the names of image files, but that's not important with cloaking...or so it would seem...

If a page has no images at all, isn't that kind of out of the ordinary? Would a spider potentially pick up on this fact or at least have some kind of notification for a human admin at the engine? If so, I would think placing images even on pages that won't be seen by humans (cloaked pages) is a good idea, but otherwise I can't see any advantages and would simply use an all-text page...any thoughts and/or definitive answers?

~Canton

[littleman]

I would put the images in, it is just good insurance.

[Air]

I wouldn't make it image heavy, but including a logo and a sprinkling of images is part of the recipe to making good pages for the spiders. Remember they still see the image tags, it will also more easily pass muster if it is human reviewed. Pages with images tend to upease a perception of spam.

[Bing Sharples]

Concurred.........web-position gold certainly indicates that the spiders look for the image ALT text. Lets face it if you were designing an engine algorithm with anti-spam in mind wouldn't you??

[ebgreen]

I have rankings on GOOGLE just from ALT Text.

[tilt]

What if you're targetting Lynx? Does this mean that sites designed for Lynx rank poorly, or are considered spam?

[Air]

>Does this mean that sites designed for Lynx rank poorly, or are considered spam?

No, not at all, quite the reverse actually. But if only the search engine pages are designed ;) for Lynx, while others see pages optimized for image capable browsers, then a logo and a sprinkling of images on the Lynx optimized pages won't hurt.

>What if you're targetting Lynx?
Really? You target Lynx in your page design? :) :)

[tilt]

>Really? You target Lynx in your page design?
Umm. Doesn't everyone? :)

(I forgot to add <hypothetical> and </hypothetical> tags to my question.) :)