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IMG alt text has been used for stuffing hidden text for as long as I can remember. Still, it's a shame to loose this key element of allowing robot accessibility for image heavy pages, just as business and even government bodies are starting to take Web accessibility seriously.
With any luck, Google will find that it wasn't a major spam problem and set things back (as they did after ignoring guestbook links for a while this time last year).
I have an image at the top of my home page with two of the three words in the alt not showing up anywhere else on the page. If I search for these three words the page does not show up in the first 500 results. An interior page with all three words in the body (not close to each other) did show up around #200.
All that proves, if anything, is that that particular month's algorithm thought body text is more important than alt text, which, I assume, most of us do as well.
If you want to know if the thesis "Google drops alt attributes" is correct, then replace your three words with "extraordinary lilac penguins" - once the page is reindexed and those results show up, if your page is not one of the 150 or so results for that phrase, then Google has dropped the rating of alt attributes...
If you want to know if the thesis "Google drops alt attributes" is correct, then replace your three words with "extraordinary lilac penguins" - once the page is reindexed and those results show up, if your page is not one of the 150 or so results for that phrase, then Google has dropped the rating of alt attributes...
Or I could do the same search I did before and then search within the results for my URL, thus saving 7 weeks worry and anticipation. Still, the page does not show up.
Noone has come forth and said that they have a search that works.
Just a thought. Everyone here (myself included) is talking about searching for something which can't be found anywhere else on the page. Perhaps that is the litmus test. The alt text must appear elsewhere on the page and THEN it is indexed, which would make sense and go along with Marcia's post.
If this is the case there would be questions. Would something pluralized in ALT text and singular in body text be the same thing? Ther are more.
Regardless of what GG says, there has been a change. I have #1 ranking in google for a very niche, industry specific 2 word term (about 3500 results in Google). One of my competitors had been giving me a run for the money. The only place the term showed on his site was in keyword stuffed alt tags, er, attributes.
He is nowhere to be found now :-)
His spamming was close enough to the edge I had considered reporting him. The term was for a service he does not offer, nor did his site have any information about the service.
Looks like it is of no concern anymore...
Regards
No, it's not the same as singular - using widget singular (not the real word) returns nothing.
Incidentally, a search for an exact phrase in quotes that is only in the title attribute of a text link (with individual words that do appear individually on the page, but not in a phrase) does not show up out of 38 pages returned in a search for the exact phrase.
try a search for "o ooO"
(the alttag on your page: [google.com...] the four balls on the left bottom of that page has that alttag)
or an exact search for: "google advertising programs"
the alttext for your page: [google.com...]
I could be confused, but I thought that until recently that type of searching would yield those pages.
there has been a change i definitely tracked but that was more like 4-5 months ago i think
it is not directly a change of handling alt-text
but before that alt-text was ok for ranking on any pic and after that only alt-text on images that were links got ranked.
the value of those alt-texts doesnt have changed methinks..
vitaplease, the "o ooO" search is great. Unfortunately, we can't prove when this happened now.
As GoogleGuy says, "people should take posts on forums with a grain of salt". I wish I could go back and run tests from before the Feb26 update.
pageoneresults:
> Let us not forget that there are other SE's besides Google who will continue to use the alt text in the algo.
Yup, and the disabled accessibility angle is even more important IMO. It was VI accessibility that got me interested in robot accessibility, but "open to abuse" has always been a problem with HTML's multi-mode access features.
