Forum Moderators: open
IMG alt text has been used for stuffing hidden text for as long as I can remember. Still, it's a shame to loose this key element of allowing robot accessibility for image heavy pages, just as business and even government bodies are starting to take Web accessibility seriously.
With any luck, Google will find that it wasn't a major spam problem and set things back (as they did after ignoring guestbook links for a while this time last year).
I find this interesting?
Appreciate your comments.
All best
X-Global Test Engineer, (Forbes 50 Top Ten org.)
In fact the change may even do the disabled some good, if it encourages webmasters to use plain text instead of pictures for everything.
One example is www.risepartners.com alt tags are for these handicaped peoples.
I had to make sure I did not optimize the alt tags and keep them descriptive to exactly the point of the images etc.
========================================================
Moment of Silece - Space Shuttle Columbia - God bless the family of all those lost.
What I really forgot was to number the points correctly -- they should have been 1) to 8) --- that's what comes through posting in a hectic day.
-----
ciml :
stevew, some of our results are similar but some are quite different.
-----
They are my observations only -- what are yours?
-----
GGG :
a consensus on whether we do index it, let alone whether we should..
-----
Don't know if you do, but that was my best guess.
As for whether you should ... for my 2 pence (UK, y'see) I'd say yes to indexing alt text that describes the image but no to anything that's too obviously tied in with keywords. Maybe only when there isn't much overall text content on the page. But definitely some kind of consideration when an image is used for a link.
---------------------------------------------------
Hollywood, I agree that alt text is great for accessibility, and that we should use that information to the degree we can. Google tries to make its site very accessible to text browsers for just this reason--and we'd appreciate any accessibility advice about the google.com site.
The fact that alt text is usually hidden means that it's open to abuse, and Google has to take that into account when we're scoring pages. But I think we strike a pretty good balance on alt text.
-
Hollywood, I'm in two minds on whether Google's change is good or bad for disabled accessibility.
On the one hand people interested in robot usability want Google to be able to understand the words on the page, so they are encouraged to facilitate non visual use even if they aren't clued up on accessible Web design. This is good for visually impaired users.
On the other hand, people have been taking advantage of alt text for keyword stuffing. This is bad for visually impaired users.
The "inevitable, but sad" subtitle for this thread isn't meant to criticise Google's decision; it's unfortunate that they have to make these kinds of choices.
stevew:
> what are yours?
I don't see any bold weighting in this month's index.
Just be sure that the Google website Algo takes into account this disabled persons angle on how their browsers read to them the information on the page and how it indexes sites that will benefit a disabled person by using the alt info.
I had used an example earlier www.risepartners.com sort of simple but made for disabled persons.
God bless all today
- Have a look at your page using Lynx and see if it makes sense. I would suggest that this gives a good idea of what is legitimate ALT text and what isn't
Have i got that much correct?
Thanks.
Also just wondering what people are referring to when they say "Tile tags". I thought it was referring to the obvious page title but i read further back that someone called it an "image title tag". May i ask what the imate title tag is?
Ive looked at all the properties of my images but cannot see anything that relates to the title of it.
thanks
Also just wondering what people are referring to when they say "Tile tags". I thought it was referring to the obvious page title but i read further back that someone called it an "image title tag".
That's a common area of confusion, caused in part because people refer to it as a "tag," which it is not. It should be referred to as the "title attribute." Also commonly misused is "alt tag;" that's actually an attribute as well.
You can use "title" in basically the same way you use "alt," but within a broader range of elements -- alt text should only be used with IMG and AREA elements.
More information: [w3.org...]
However, when i just changed all of these attributes to 'Title' istead of 'Alt', NONE of the keyword density anylisers pickup the text within. It seems therefore in the case of these free anylizers that the 'title' attribute is worse than the 'Alt' one in terms of page content detection.
Does anyone know whether this would also be the case with Google? i would go ahead and change all my Alts to Titles but after this brief experiment, i feel quite reluctant to do so.
Hear your comments soon.
Thanks.
So if you want alt text to appear on mouseover, and use a title attribute, you will need to repeat the alt text in the title attribute. But since alt text should be an image description and title text a (presumably brief) title, this is not a simple decision to make -- apart from leaving out the title attribute altogether.
My understanding is that alt text is indexed by Google only if the image provides a link, and by some other SE's regardless.
Also, that although title attributes are indexed, their benefit is marginal, if at all -- perhaps another argument for not using them?
I suppose therefore that if ALT attributes are of now SEO value to webmasters, where they would not have included them otherwise, its worth not using them since it increases the page size. Not considerable of course but teh smaller the better when considering those poor spiders having to crawl all the way through.
Please correct me if im wrong.
Thanks.
While page size is an issue, it's not as critical as that.
I would always include meaningful alt text, not just for the SE's that do index them, but also for the benefit of visitors with images turned off.
By all means, make your code 'lean and mean' - strip out unnecessary META tags, mousover effects, comments, etc. I also use CSS to virtually strip out all formatting from the code. But keep this in perspective : don't make small page sizes a primary objective -- especially where page content (ie the text on the page) is concerned.
Will bear what you've said in mind.
The strangest threads I've seen recently was one where someone was convinced that ODP editors were now kingmakers, and then in another simultaneous thread someone was saying how duplicate copies of the ODP would hurt a site. As always, the best thing to do is bring your judgment with you as you read.
(I'm not saying something hasn't changed about our alt text processing, but I don't think it has.)
Whatever the case, it's a good thing if Google has its ways of being selective about the alt text that it indexes.
I look forward to the days when it does the same with the other common spam magnets.
Okay, I haven't done an exhaustive check, but I'm pretty sure that Google has not changed its handling of alt tags anytime recently.
So when did the alt text get dropped then? It is not playing a part now as far as I can tell. I have an image at the top of my home page with two of the three words in the alt not showing up anywhere else on the page. If I search for these three words the page does not show up in the first 500 results. An interior page with all three words in the body (not close to each other) did show up around #200. Besides that, i've always considered ciml to be an excellent reliable source of info regarding these matters. I know its something he watches as he warned me about this very day several months ago in a sticky on the subject. I trust you too GoogleGuy, so what gives?
I did a search for word1 word2 + three word phrase (the three word phrase appears only in alt text) and it comes up for the search, showing that alternate phrase in the description snippet in bold.
[edited by: Marcia at 6:13 am (utc) on Feb. 10, 2003]
