Does G view Link and Alt text similarly?

[glengara]

It's been suggested G views Alt text similarly to Link text, and terms that are only in an Alt tag can appear in the cache of a returned page as "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page".
I'm not convinced, as the Alt text (blue widget logo) of my home page linked logo doesn't come up on a search.
Anyone convinced G views Alt and Link text similarly?

[AthlonInside]

Alt text will be treated as normal text and link text (if it is anchored).

What I am sure is 120x60 banner defintely work this way and have no idea if size does matter.

Anyone with experiece with the ALT of smaller banner such as 88x31?

[nancyb]

alt text on a logo has worked for a long time. I finally had to remove it from my logo because it was skewing what I wanted to show for the page (someday I'll get to CSS positioning ;)

I have also seen alt text come up from other images, but not as regularly.

<added> that wasn't clear ... I removed the link, but left the alt text in place >

[dirkz]

I have pages where the good ranking for a particular keyphrase could come from the appearance in the alt-text of the images on the page, together with other text. I also see these occurrences highlighted by Google when viewing the SERPs.

[AthlonInside]

Can you give the dimension (width x height) of the graphic you guy are refering to? Thank You.

[dirkz]

The dimension is not encoded in the img-tag, I leave that to the browser. I doubt seriously that Google reads this.

[AthlonInside]

Google reads it. You can confirm by stuffing lots of keywords in a 1x1 pixel. Then you might start thinking of the day that you have a GREEN bar. :)

[dirkz]

Then you might start thinking of the day that you have a GREEN bar. :)

LOL :) The pictures are approx. 100x128.