Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Null Alt Image Tags vs Missing Alt Image Tags

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Null Alt Image Tags vs Missing Alt Image Tags

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    6
    1490
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • 94501
      94501 last edited by

      Hi,

      Would it be better for organic search to have a null alt image tag programatically added to thousands of images without alt image tags or just leave them as is.

      The option of adding tailored alt image tags to thousands of images is not possible.

      Is having sitewide alt image tags really important to organic search overall or what? Right now, probably 10% of the sites images have alt img tags. A huge number of those images are pages that aren

      Thanks!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • 94501
        94501 last edited by

        Thanks, guys.

        I've adjusted alt images tags on pages that really matter to me for organic. The tens of thousands of other images/pages are just going to have to chillax.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • ChrisAshton
          ChrisAshton @94501 last edited by

          No problem at all. To be honest, it's really not a huge deal and probably not worth the dev budget or manhours required.

          In most cases with a site like this, I'd be more inclined to add good alt text for all images on the most popular pages then, as you're working through other pages throughout the life of the campaign, update the alt text while you're at it.

          If you're already updating the page title or content on a page, it's not that much extra effort to do the alt text while you're there.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • 94501
            94501 last edited by

            Hi Eric & Chris,

            Thanks for the help. Given the size of the site, tens of thousands of pages and more than one image per average page, I guess my real question is how much trouble is this worth? I don't think the image file name is really going to reliably yield alt img text. So, about the most one could do is possibly a site-wide empty tag. Is this really worth it for organic search? Seems like kind of a phony manipulation to appeal to a search algorithm in maybe some microscopic way. But, I could be wrong, so that is why I'm asking here. If it really matters, we'll do it. But if it doesn't, would rather not. Especially when you consider the next thing will be that having empty alt img tags will some day be a small negative, right? That would be so Google of them.

            ChrisAshton 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Eric_Rohrback
              Eric_Rohrback last edited by

              Is it possible to use a script to write? Alternative option is to run a screaming frog crawl looking for all images, download into excel, and use the image file name to help create a tag. That's assuming you've named the image with something specific instead of leaving it default (eg: image4893054893.jpg). Ideally you would want to include image alt tags, and many platforms can help make it easy. Could you give a little more information about your situation? There might be a pattern you can use to update on a large scale. I would not have the same tag applied to all images, because that really doesn't help search engines understand the photo and wouldn't be useful to users who have vision impairments. If you don't have the time to do it, then hire someone to assign alt tags (virtual assistant). Screaming Frog will make it really easy to find all the image files.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • ChrisAshton
                ChrisAshton last edited by

                Naturally in the perfect world, meaningful attributes should be added. Assuming you're a mere mortal with a limited number of hours in the day... the best short-term solution to this is going to be having the alt attribute applied but empty.

                To my knowledge (happy to be pointed towards data showing otherwise), there's no real ranking difference between these two options. The reason I prefer to add a blank alt in this instance is because assistive technology (like screen readers for vision impaired users) are going to have a much better experience on your site this way.

                If you have a blank alt, the screen readers will essentially ignore the image since they're going to read " ". On the other hand, if you don't have an alt attribute in the , it's going to read the source instead. Even a short img src is going to be cumbersome, especially if you have an image-heavy site!

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                Browse Questions

                Explore more categories

                • Moz Tools

                  Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                • SEO Tactics

                  Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                • Community

                  Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                • Digital Marketing

                  Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                • Research & Trends

                  Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                • Support

                  Connect on product support and feature requests.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • AndyRSB

                  Near Duplicate Title Tag Checker

                  Hi Everyone, I know there are a lot of tools like Siteliner, which can check the uniqueness of body copy, but are there any that can restrict the check to the title tags alone? Alternatively, is there an Excel or Google Sheets function that would allow me to do the same thing? Thanks, Andy

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyRSB
                  0
                • eddys_kap

                  Why is our noindex tag not working?

                  Hi, I have the following page where we've implemented a no index tag. But when we run this page in screaming frog or this tool here to verify the noidex is present and functioning, it shows that it's not. But if you view the source of the page, the code is present in the head tag. And unfortunately we've seen instances where Google is indexing pages we've noindexed. Any thoughts on the example above or why this is happening in Google? Eddy

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eddys_kap
                  0
                • Striventa

                  Too many Tags and Categories what should I do to clean this up?

                  Hello, Everyone! I am trying to do a clean up for one of my client sites. I'm noticing that the Categories and tags are way out of hand. It looks like random tags and categories were just added because they could be added. Are all of these tags and categories contributing to duplicate content? And if so What method should I go about to cleaning this up? The only thing that seems logical to me is rel=canonical. Thank you so much!

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Striventa
                  1
                • fablau

                  Combining images with text as anchor text

                  Hello everyone, I am working to create sub-category pages on our website virtualsheetmusic.com, and I'd like to have your thoughts on using a combination of images and text as anchor text in order to maximize keyword relevancy. Here is an example (I'll keep it simple): Let's take our violin sheet music main category page located at /violin/, which includes the following sub-categories: Christmas Classical Traditional So, the idea is to list the above sub-categories as links on the main violin sheet music page, and if we had to use simple text links, that would be something like: Christmas
                  Classical
                  Traditional Now, since what we really would like to target are keywords like: "christmas violin sheet music" "classical violin sheet music" "traditional violin sheet music" I would be tempted to make the above links as follows: Christmas violin sheet music
                  Classical violin sheet music
                  Traditional violin sheet music But I am sure that would be too much overwhelming for the users, even if the best CSS design were applied to it. So, my idea would be to combine images with text, in a way to put those long-tail keywords inside the image ALT tag, so to have links like these: Christmas
                  Classical
                  Traditional That would allow a much easier way to work the UI , and at the same time keep relevancy for each link. I have seen some of our competitors doing that and they have top-notch results on the SEs. My questions are: 1. Do you see any negative effect of doing this kind of links from the SEO standpoint? 2. Would you suggest any better way to accomplish what I am trying to do? I am eager to know your thoughts about this. Thank you in advance to anyone!

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau
                  1
                • McTaggart

                  Image URLs - best practice

                  Hi - I'm assuming image URL best practice follows same principles as non image URLs (not too many files and so on) - I notice alot of web devs putting photos in subdomains, so wonder if I'm missing something (I usually avoid subdomains like the plague)!

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
                  1
                • rpaiva

                  Adding a Canonical Tag to each page referencing itself?

                  Hey Mozers! I've noticed that on www.Zappos.com they have a Canonical tag on each page referencing it self.  I have heard that this is a popular method but I dont see the point in canon tagging a page to its self. Any thoughts?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rpaiva
                  0
                • WebServiceConsulting.com

                  Noindex : Do Follow or No Follow Tags?

                  Hello, I have a website with tags (which have the noindex tag) on each article post. I've been told that I should noindex/nofollow these tag pages, because they are getting link juice passed to them, and since they aren't getting indexed, it's wasting link juice to those pages, when the link juice could be passed to a page that is actually getting indexed. What are your thoughts on this? Also, what would be the point to noindex/follow a page, if you are noindexing that page? Isn't it just wasting link juice? What is the proper SEO way to optimize tags.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com
                  0
                • Jellyfish-Agency

                  Rel=canonical tag on original page?

                  Afternoon All,
                  We are using Concrete5 as our CMS system, we are due to change but for the moment we have to play with what we have got. Part of the C5 system allows us to attribute our main page into other categories, via a page alaiser add-on. But what it also does is create several url paths and duplicate pages depending on how many times we take the original page and reference it in other categories. We have tried C5 canonical/SEO add-on's but they all seem to fall short. We have tried to address this issue in the most efficient way possible by using the rel=canonical tag. The only issue is the limitations of our cms system. We add the canonical tag to the original page header and this will automatically place this tag on all the duplicate pages and in turn fix the problem of duplicate content. The only problem is the canonical tag is on the original page as well, but it is referencing itself, effectively creating a tagging circle. Does anyone foresee a problem with the canonical tag being on the original page but in turn referencing itself? What we have done is try to simplify our duplicate content issues. We have over 2500 duplicate page issues because of this aliasing add-on and want to automate the canonical tag addition, rather than go to each individual page and manually add this tag, so the original reference page can remain the original. We have implemented this tag on one page at the moment with 9 duplicate pages/url's and are monitoring, but was curious if people had experienced this before or had any thoughts?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jellyfish-Agency
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.