ALT Tag Labels that Use Near Duplicate Text-SEO No, No???
-
Greetings Moz Community:
About 280 pages of my 650 page commercial real estate website are listing pages. Each listing page contains between two and five photos, each with a corresponding ALT tag.
My developer has set up the labeling of the ALT tags in the following manner. I can create a label for the first photo, but each subsequent photo automatically gets the same label plus a number tagged to the ALT. Like this:
alt="Flatiron Loft for Rent"
alt="Flatiron Loft for Rent - Photo 0"
alt="Flatiron Loft for Rent - Photo 1"
alt="Flatiron Loft for Rent - Photo 2"
alt="Flatiron Loft for Rent - Photo 3"Is this method neutral, positive or negative for SEO? I am concerned that this manner of labeling ALT tags might risk triggering a duplicate content penalty. In early July I migrated the site from Drupal to Wordpress. We changed the URL structure (adding a sub-directory) for the listings at that time. Google is refusing to index about 100 listing pages. Any chance the ALT tags are contributing to Google's reluctance to index the URLs?
I might also add that images are hosted on Amazon's CDN.
A sample listing URL is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/278-21st-street-flatiron-loft-for-rent
Note: (/listings/278) were added to the URL in July, representing the listing sub directory plus the listing number.I Look forward to hearing the opinion of the MOZ community!!!
THANKS!!!
Alan -
Could you give the main/featured image a custom alt attribute, and let the rest share a format like you show above? So like this:
alt="Blue Cotton Tee by Billabong"
alt="Alternate Billabong Tee Image 002"
alt="Alternate Billabong Tee Image 003"
alt="Alternate Billabong Tee Image 004"
alt="Alternate Billabong Tee Image 005"I would not leave the rest without an alt attribute.
-
Hi,
I know this post is a bit old, but just got into a similar situation.
I have series of product images (on an eCommerce website), that are all showing the same product in different ways.
In this case, the real description would be like:alt="Clothing Load 001"
alt="Clothing Load 002"
alt="Clothing Load 003"
alt="Clothing Load 004"
alt="Clothing Load 005"But, since this might be considered keyword stuffing according to the posts above...
Would it be better to just give an ALT tag to the first image, leaving the rest without an alt tag?
Looking for similar keywords looks time-consuming since each product might have 50 images.Thank you,
-
On the sample page you provided it would be much better to label the photos with alt attributes like this:
Main image:Flatiron Loft for Rent
Hallway View for Listing #278
Window Views of City for Listing #278
Etc...The point being to describe what the image is instead of worrying about what keywords to use.
What you're doing now probably wasn't the cause of a major traffic drop, but it probably isn't helping much either and there is a possibility that it could be seen as keyword stuffing.
-
I doubt the duplicate content penalty from this but yes this is not a healthy practice as you are trying to stuff the keywords by adding one alt tag on all images on that page.
Ideally your system should have the ability to denote Alt tags to all images separately so that you can change the Alt image tag for each image when it is required!
Hope this helps!
-
It's not duplicate content it may however, be considered as keyword stuffing. Mix it up. _Loungeroom of Loft for Rent _etc.
Did you set up 301 redirects for your old pages/urls ? Check GWT for broken links and resubmit a sitemap.
-
I think that is not good for seo as it can over optimize word Flatiron Loft for Rent. If you have problems of time to alt all fotos it correspondent description i you will give the same name to all of them i would just label one with keyword and the other a would just use a name that you dont want to get the risk of being penalized for.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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.
Related Questions
-
No content using Fetch
Wooah, this one makes me feel a bit nervous. The cache version of the site homepage shows all the text, but I understand that is the html code constructed by the browser. So I get that. If I Google some of the content it is there in the index and the cache version is yesterday. If I Fetch and Render in GWT then none of the content is available in the preview - neither Googlebot or visitor view. The whole preview is just the menu, a holding image for a video and a tag line for it. There are no reports of blocked resources apart from a Wistia URL. How can I decipher what is blocking Google if it does not report any problems? The CSS is visible for reference to, for example, <section class="text-within-lines big-text narrow"> class="data"> some content... Ranking is a real issue, in part by a poorly functioning main menu. But i'm really concerned with what is happening with the render.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Duplicate meta descriptions
Hi All Does having quite a few Duplicate meta descriptions hurt SEO. I am worried that I have too many and thinking this could be the reason for my recent drop in search visibility. Thanks in Advance. Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
International SEO Question
_The company I work for has a website www.example.com that ranks very well in English speaking countries - US, UK, CA. For legal reasons, we now need to create www.example.co.uk to be accessible and rank in google.co.uk. Obviously we want this change to be as smooth as possible with little effect on rankings in the UK. We have two options that we're talking through at the moment - Use the hreflang tag on both the .com and the .co.uk to tell Google which site to rank in each country. My worry with this is that we might lose our rankings in the UK as it will be a brand new site with little to no links pointing to it. 301 redirect to the .co.uk based on UK IP addresses. I'm skeptical about this. As a 301 passes most of the link juice, I'm not sure how Google would treat this type of thing - would the .com lose ranking? So my questions are - would we lose ranking in the UK if we use option 1? Would option 2 work? What would you do? Any help is appreciated._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | awestwood0 -
Duplicate content within sections of a page but not full page duplicate content
Hi, I am working on a website redesign and the client offers several services and within those services some elements of the services crossover with one another. For example, they offer a service called Modelling and when you click onto that page several elements that build up that service are featured, so in this case 'mentoring'. Now mentoring is common to other services therefore will feature on other service pages. The page will feature a mixture of unique content to that service and small sections of duplicate content and I'm not sure how to treat this. One thing we have come up with is take the user through to a unique page to host all the content however some features do not warrant a page being created for this. Another idea is to have the feature pop up with inline content. Any thoughts/experience on this would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Canonical tag
Hi all, I have an ecommerce client and on the pages they have a drop down so customers can view via price, list etc. Natrurally I want a canonical tag on these pages, here's the question. as they have different pages of products, the canonical tag on http://www.thegreatgiftcompany.com/occassion/christmas#items-/occassion/christmas/page=7/?sort=price_asc,searchterm=,layout=grid,page=1 is to http://www.thegreatgiftcompany.com/occassion/christmas#items-/occassion/christmas/page=7. now, because the page=7 is a duplicate of the main page, shouldn't the canonical just be to the main page rather than page=7? Even when there is a canonical tag on the /Christmas/page=7 to the /Christmas page? hope that makes sense to everyone!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
Duplicate page titles Wordpress SEO/Yoast
Hi I have a Wordpress site using the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. Everything appears to be fine except that on 1 Feb SEOMoz crawl suddenly picked up a bunch of errors. The errors are duplicate page titles, and these exist only for the mysite.com/page/X pages. I can't find any setting in Yoast that looks wrong or tells me how to fix this. The pages are also dynamically canonicalizing to themselves - not sure if this makes any difference although I don't know how this is happening. Does anyone know how to fix this duplicate title error? Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alextanner0 -
Image Links Vs. Text Links, Questions About PR & Anchor Text Value
I am searching for testing results to find out the value of text links versus image links with alt text. Do any of you have testing results that can answer or discuss these questions? If 2 separate pages on the same domain were to have the same Page Authority, same amount of internal and external links and virtually carry the same strength and the location of the image or text link is in the same spot on both pages, in the middle of the body within paragraphs. Would an image link with alt text pass the same amount of Page Authority and PR as a text link? Would an image link with alt text pass the same amount of textual value as a text link? For example, if the alt text on the image on one page said "nike shoes" and the text link on the other page said "nike shoes" would both pass the same value to drive up the rankings of the page for "nike shoes"? Would a link wrapped around an image and text phrase be better than creating 2 links, one around the image and one around the text pointing to the same page? The following questions have to do with when you have an image and text link on a page right next to each other, like when you link a compelling graphic image to a category page and then list a text link underneath it to pass text link value to the linked-to page. If the image link displays before the text link pointing to a page, would first link priority use the alt text and not even apply the anchor text phrase to the linked page? Would it be best to link the image and text phrase together pointing to the product page to decrease the link count on the page, thus allowing for more page rank and page authority to pass to other pages that are being linked to on the page? And would this also pass anchor text value to the link-to page since the link would include an image and text? I know that the questions sound a bit repetitive, so please let me know if you need any further clarification. I'd like to solve these to further look into ways to improve some user experience aspects while optimizing the link strength on each page at the same time. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abernhardt
Andrew0 -
Should I check Use noindex for Tag Archives?
I have a page indexed > (http://mysite.com/mypost) and also http://mysite.com/tag/mypost The same post shows up twice, one with /tag/ one without when I search site:http://mysite.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinner-280241
Is this a duplicate content?? Can I get penalized for this? In the All in one plugin should I check Use noindex for Tag Archives to avoid this or doesn't matter.
Thanks0