Forum Moderators: open
Great forum! I've already learned a ton by reading~
Well, I hate feeling like an 'SEO Cop' but...
Recently every subject matter my clients go after is a subject that is filled with duplicate sites/diff. urls and all have PageRanks (usually equal). I understand they may not have broken any rules, but how hard is it to have your
URL 'Found' by Google? Not that hard (Thank God).
Questions:
I have reported these sites to the spam report at Google. If in fact these sites in question Did break the rules (As they DID on Alta Vista) does it still take until the next fully revised index to see a difference? Is there anyway this could be changed? Any plans to do so?
Next Questions - Alt Tags:
According to Google, the Alt Tag is supposed to be 'descriptive and accurate'. So my first question is: what is 'descriptive and accurate'? For instance say there was an image at the top of your page with the words 'xxxxx'. Does the alt tag being the exactly the same really make sense in all or even most cases? What if the image said 'cow dunk'? According to W3.org, the purpose of alt tags is:
"Specifying alternate text assists users without graphic
display terminals, users whose browsers don't support
forms, visually impaired users, those who use speech
synthesizers, those who have configured their graphical
user agents not to display images, etc."
Does anyone see a conflict here? In the previous example, for instance, how would an alt tag of "cow dunk" actually help the user? What if there was really a picture of 'cow dunk' on the same page? Shouldn't an alt image briefly say what the image does (button for a link) -->E.G. "back to home page" or, if the image does nothing special say something like "Tom,Dick & Harry Logo"?
I know a lot of this is just slicing words...
NEXT, an interesting note from w3.org about alt tags I want to mention since it should be informative to many.
From w3.org - "Do not specify irrelevant alternate text when
including images intended to format a page, for instance,
alt="red ball" would be inappropriate for an image that
adds a red ball for decorating a heading or paragraph. In
such cases, the alternate text should be the empty string
(""). Authors are in any case advised to avoid using
images to format pages; style sheets should be used
instead. Do not specify meaningless alternate text (e.g., "dummy text"). Not only will this frustrate users, it will slow down user agents that must convert text to speech or braille output."
So, I'd also like any input on the empty string variable and also 'dummy text'. If 'dummy text' is a word like 'logo' which actually describes that the image does nothing should it really be dummy?
And to think I thought every image HAD to be described to be 'politically correct'... :(
NEXT, I've read on the B-Central site that MSN actually promotes the use of misspelled words to be found >> "The "alt" attribute is also a good place for misspellings and plural keyword phrases that you may not have used elsewhere."
So my question is: what are Google's thoughts on this matter? Does adding misspellings hurt or help the index? How about users? How about multilingual problems associated with allowing intentional misspellings?
Lastly, I'd like to say that having the 'Google Guy' here is a great step in working closely with webmasters by Google!
Thanks for your time, all of you ~
Spam Reports: It can take a lot longer than the next update. Google seems to prefer to change its algo to deal with spam rather than manual edits. That algo can and probably will take months to change unless the problems you reported already fall into some of the new "anti-spam" filters Google is supposed to be implementing in the "near" future.
WRT alt tags: I wouldn't lose too much sleep in this area. The power of alt tags is diminishing all the time. If you are in a competitive category chasing competitive keywords I doubt the alt tags are going to make much difference.....backlinks and anchor text will though!
Thanks for your input! It is appreciated and well understood, although, I was really hoping to spawn a little more discussion on the topics I presented... I like your nic-name, by the way :)
Best,
Roland
