Image alt and title attributes: risk of keyword stuffing?

[WebWalla]

Regardless of the disregard for standards, I like the fact that my IE visitors can mouse-over an image and see the alt attribute shown as text.

However, with the surge of the new browsers that actually seem to follow standards, like FF and Chrome, such functionality is only available if the title attribute is used.

So, if I simply replicate the alt attribute text in my title attribute for all images, do you think I am risking some kind of keyword stuffing penalty?

[Receptional Andy]

I don't think there's much risk of perceived malpractice, since title and alt attributes are not all that important for ranking anyway. But I would urge you to use the elements as they were intended. That is, an alt(ernative) attribute [w3.org] that allows those who can't view images to understand what was conveyed by the image, and a title attribute [w3.org] which is a bit like a "note" attached to an element - some additional useful text.

There aren't really any circumstances where the two provide any benefit by being duplicated.

If you're intending to have text visible to those able to view the image, make it additional text that tells them something else that's useful.

[rainborick]

No, you won't be penalized for duplicating the alt text in the title attribute as long as you make the text relevant to the image and don't make it too repetitive of other alt/title pairs. I suspect that this is probably an area where you wouldn't get any real penalty even if you went overboard, but the page simply wouldn't rank as well as it would have if the text were within reasonable bounds.

[minnapple]

Though I see you are not going down this road, alt tag spamming [ jamming many keywords into the alt tag ] is an offense that Google will take action on.

I know this to be a fact.

[ChicagoFan67]

For several years my homepage was never able to rank for my primary keyword despite being very relevent and having a good strong backlink profile. One day I went and cleaned up, removing keyword repetition from the alt and meta keyword and description tags. About a week after doing so, it appeared on the first page of results.