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The question is, do title tags inside links and alt tags help?
Any comments appreciated.
Yes, they will both help you a lot in the serps.
Google and the others give a fairly large importance
to links and titles in them.
SEO :-)
Google and the others give a fairly large importance to links and titles in them.
Google gives large importance to anchor text in links. It no longer pays attention to alt tags (which haven't been important for a while), and it's not clear that the title attribute inside links ever carried much weight.
Google Ditches IMG Alt Text
[webmasterworld.com...]
it's not clear that the title attribute inside links ever carried much weight
I've done some testing over the past couple months and have confirmed that the title attribute carries little, if any, weight. Neither the origin nor the target pages were returned for searches on the title attribute text.
Just my 2 cts: if we as webdesigners and SEOs would use tags and attributes as they were meant to be used and if our only focus was to write pages that are easy to be used by anyone no matter what Google would not have stopped looking at title and/or alt attributes.
Now you ask if Google looks at those, and because Google doesn't, you stop using them so you won't have "code bloat" in your site. Fine. When do you think about your guests/customers? Maybe they were perfectly happy if only there was more information about the link when they hover it?
Where you can optmize your site is by using wise and clever anchor text in links, which is also good for users. Then you might not even need to "alt-ify" oder "title-ify" your anchor tags, but you still can if it makes sense. IMHO, that's the point.
As Google always says (not a quote, but I thought I've read it somewhere): if it's good for users, it's good for Google.
Okay, sorry, that were 4 cts.
:)
I observed this, the first gif file on the page if it has alt tag with keyword, then it shows up in google SERPS.
Example:
Keyword search widgets.
If a page has widgets in it's alt text on the first gif, then it seems to show up in google.
Any similar observations?
Aravind
I can confirm this. A page i'm continously reporting to google is #3 for keyword. The keyword is not only found one time within a alt text but multiple times within multiple 1x1 pixel images at the very top of the page.
The #3 listing looks:
keyword
... Newsletter. Surftip. Bookmark. keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword,
keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword,
keyword, keyword, ...
The site is linked from a couple hundred guestbooks using the link text keyword. It's a proven fact (proven by this example) that this is a way to outrank well established sites that offer real content about keyword. Sigh.
Very helful board, i am glad i found this board.
This is only true of the image forms part of a link.
Thanks for the info,will check on that.
Aravind
Really? Well, using all the same keyword as alt text and link title text even for a thumbnail overview isn't of any value for users that can't or don't want to see images, imho. It's even more fishy if all "thumbnails" are linked to the same page.
However, the example i explained in my post uses 1x1 pixel "thumbnails" that are so deeply embedded into nested tables that it was quite impossible for me to find them even if i used a wysiwyg editor. The best thing is: he knows how risky his tactitcs are. Now he uses images of 1 x 20, 1 x 48, 1 x 15 ... pixel size embedded into redundant table cells, ts, ts ... the site is continously climbing up in positions since a couple of months. So back to the initial question of this thread: yep, title and alt tags are seen by robots and credited by se's.
Allthough your point may be right for some pages, most of the times it's just spam. ;)
While observing the alt tag of first gif file on the page.I noticed that if it's Hyperlinked then it has more weightage.
I also have noticed that those sites that repeat title in the alt tag seem to be in higher serps then those who carry only keywords.
Any Similar observations?
Aravind
Yes. That would be spam. 1x1 pixels get you axed very quickly these days too.
do title tags inside links and alt tags help?
about 3 1/2 years ago I made a site map page with all keyword laden title tags for a travel. Within a month and a half that page of my site was dominating all SERPs in Google for that particular regional category. When I say dominating, I mean that if you looked for:
regional-destination raspberry jam
I was likely to be in the first position even though raspberry jam made no appearance on any page of my site.
Unfortunately, I disappeared from Altavista. Not even looking for the URL would pull me up. Totally blacklisted. If you recall, Altavista was, at that time the industry leader and the "top" search engine, and google was this search engine only nerds and SEO guys had heard about.
So I removed all of the HREF title tags, and several months later I was back in Altavista. I still am doing great in Google, but I am pretty sure that they fixed that little glitch in the googlebot a long time ago.
But I still use HREF title tags in situations where I have a lot of graphic navigation, but I try to make it fairly low key, descriptions like "opens the home page in a new browser window", rather than keyword stuffing.
But I do think that googlebot parses title tags - but like many techniques abuse leads to diminishing returns.
