Alt attribute redundancy

[MrStitch]

Lets say my site is selling widgets, and I've got all my widgets on one html page. I also have a picture of each widget that shows the different colors.

If I use the 'alt' tag attribute, and every widgets tag says "Blue Widget" "Red Widget" or "Green Widget", then will Google think its spam for the repetition of the word 'Widget'?

[Quadrille]

Pretty unlikely, I think; ALT tags should be accurate; if the pic is a widget, ALT it loud and ALT it proud!

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I would agree. If you use a bullet image on your site and call it a "bullet" then you will call it a bullet wherever it appears. This is not spamming.

[benihana]

a) its not a tag.

b) its for people who cannot see images, for whatever reason.

[Quadrille]

a) its not a tag.

Quite right; it's an attribute.
Apologies for sloppy writing. I plead 3 am :)

[larryhatch]

I put in an alt="description" for virtually all my images.
I also put in a title="description", generally the same description as the alt=.

Alt= used to be good enough by itself. NOW however, I need title= as well
because that's the only way to get Firefox to display the description on mouse-over.
Older FF versions accepted the alt=, not any more. -Larry

[tedster]

Yes, our expectations about the alt tag being displayed in the tool-tip were created by IE's behavior, but that behavior is non-standard. The W3C says to display the title tag in the tool-tip, and the alt tag is for display INSTEAD of the image when the user agent does not display images.

[benihana]

attribute

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Benihana is nit picking an attribute or a tag :)

[benihana]

yep im nitppicking - but the title attribute is very different to the title tag? :)

[tedster]

I apologize -- I am usually quite disciplined about technical vocabulary but I slipped up here. Indeed, it is an alt attribute. In cases like "title" there is both an attribute and a tag by the same name, so it becomes even more important.

Technically precise discussions often can be more productive in general. Using "url" rather than "page", "domain" rather than "site", precise use of "spider" vs. "index" and so on brings a clarity that often promotes insight.