Alt tag for src='blank.gif' on lazy load images
-
I didn't find an answer on a search on this, so maybe someone here has faced this before.
I am loading 20 images that are in the viewport and a bit below. The next 80 images I want to 'lazy-load'. They therefore are seen by the bot as a blank.gif file. However, I would like to get some credit for them by giving a description in the alt tag. Is that a no-no? If not, do they all have to be the same alt description since the src name is the same? I don't want to mess things up with Google by being too aggressive, but at the same time those are valid images once they are lazy loaded, so would like to get some credit for them.
Thanks! Ted
-
Martijn, thanks for your response. I could see Google saying that on a given page the same source image shouldn't have more than one alt description, and either penalizing such or just picking one of them or ignoring it altogether. It's the penalty I'm concerned with, of course. . But, I can also see that if they are seeing a blank.gif for the source and some code related to lazy loading they may go ahead and give credit to each alt as though a real src was loaded--and maybe even tying it to the real src image name for image search. Just looking for a bit more feedback from real-world experience first..
Has anyone else worked with this and determined if it is a pro or con?
-
Hi Ted, to be honest we do this and I don't see any big issues why we wouldn't do it. The placeholder image will probably get some more credits than usual. But the images we lazy load are loaded via JS and as Google says it can understand JS they should be able to get how we use it (too much assumptions I know, but I have more things to worry about ;-)).
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
-
How to get a large number of urls out of Google's Index when there are no pages to noindex tag?
Hi, I'm working with a site that has created a large group of urls (150,000) that have crept into Google's index. If these urls actually existed as pages, which they don't, I'd just noindex tag them and over time the number would drift down. The thing is, they created them through a complicated internal linking arrangement that adds affiliate code to the links and forwards them to the affiliate. GoogleBot would crawl a link that looks like it's to the client's same domain and wind up on Amazon or somewhere else with some affiiiate code. GoogleBot would then grab the original link on the clients domain and index it... even though the page served is on Amazon or somewhere else. Ergo, I don't have a page to noindex tag. I have to get this 150K block of cruft out of Google's index, but without actual pages to noindex tag, it's a bit of a puzzler. Any ideas? Thanks! Best... Michael P.S., All 150K urls seem to share the same url pattern... exmpledomain.com/item/... so /item/ is common to all of them, if that helps.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Google image search
How does google decide which image show up in the image search section ? Is is based on the alt tag of the image or is google able to detect what is image is about using neural nets ? If it is using neural nets are the images you put on your website taken into account to rank a page ? Let's say I do walking tours in Italy and put a picture of the leaning tower of pisa as a top image while I be penalised because even though the picture is in italy, you don't see anyone walking ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Crawl and Indexation Error - Googlebot can't/doesn't access specific folders on microsites
Hi, My first time posting here, I am just looking for some feedback on a indexation issue we have with a client and any feedback on possible next steps or items I may have overlooked. To give some background, our client operates a website for the core band and a also a number of microsites based on specific business units, so you have corewebsite.com along with bu1.corewebsite.com, bu2.corewebsite.com. The content structure isn't ideal, as each microsite follows a structure of bu1.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx, bu2.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx and so on. In addition to this each microsite has duplicate folders from the other microsites so bu1.corewebsite.com has indexable folders bu1.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx but also bu1.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx the same with bu2.corewebsite.com has bu2.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx but also bu2.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx. Therre are 5 different business units so you have this duplicate content scenario for all microsites. This situation is being addressed in the medium term development roadmap and will be rectified in the next iteration of the site but that is still a ways out. The issue
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ImpericMedia
About 6 weeks ago we noticed a drop off in search rankings for two of our microsites (bu1.corewebsite.com and bu2.corewebsite.com) over a period of 2-3 weeks pretty much all our terms dropped out of the rankings and search visibility dropped to essentially 0. I can see that pages from the websites are still indexed but oddly it is the duplicate content pages so (bu1.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx or (bu1.corewebsite.com/bu4/home.aspx is still indexed, similiarly on the bu2.corewebsite microsite bu2.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx and bu4.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx are indexed but no pages from the BU1 or BU2 content directories seem to be indexed under their own microsites. Logging into webmaster tools I can see there is a "Google couldn't crawl your site because we were unable to access your site's robots.txt file." This was a bit odd as there was no robots.txt in the root directory but I got some weird results when I checked the BU1/BU2 microsites in technicalseo.com robots text tool. Also due to the fact that there is a redirect from bu1.corewebsite.com/ to bu1.corewebsite.com/bu4.aspx I thought maybe there could be something there so consequently we removed the redirect and added a basic robots to the root directory for both microsites. After this we saw a small pickup in site visibility, a few terms pop into our Moz campaign rankings but drop out again pretty quickly. Also the error message in GSC persisted. Steps taken so far after that In Google Search Console, I confirmed there are no manual actions against the microsites. Confirmed there is no instances of noindex on any of the pages for BU1/BU2 A number of the main links from the root domain to microsite BU1/BU2 have a rel="noopener noreferrer" attribute but we looked into this and found it has no impact on indexation Looking into this issue we saw some people had similar issues when using Cloudflare but our client doesn't use this service Using a response redirect header tool checker, we noticed a timeout when trying to mimic googlebot accessing the site Following on from point 5 we got a hold of a week of server logs from the client and I can see Googlebot successfully pinging the site and not getting 500 response codes from the server...but couldn't see any instance of it trying to index microsite BU1/BU2 content So it seems to me that the issue could be something server side but I'm at a bit of a loss of next steps to take. Any advice at all is much appreciated!0 -
Can't support IE 7,8,9, 10\. Can we redirect them to another page that's optimized for those browsers so that we can have our site work on modern browers while still providing a destination of IE browsers?
Hi, Our site can't support IE 7,8,9, 10. Can we redirect them to another page that's optimized for those browsers so that we can have our site work on modern broswers while still providing a destination of IE browsers? Would their be an SEO penalty? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dspete0 -
How Many Images on 1 Page Are Acceptable
Example I have a page with a slideshow of 35 pictures. They are all unique pictures and relevant to the page, have unique alt text, though no captions or description surrounding the images. Page also has a lot of unique written content. Question: is this large nr of pictures potentially overwhelming for search engines and they may think it is spammy and it would be a safer bet to only keep the top 10 pictures on such page? I did review this great whiteboard Friday - http://moz.com/blog/image-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday - and I noticed this at very end: "The other part, and I see this happen a lot especially with bigger clients, is when you put lots and lots of images on one page, like an image gallery, those pages tend to be very hard to get indexed. The reason for that is there's not a lot unique textual content. A lot of times it's just overwhelming to users. It doesn't provide a lot of benefit in a search result." My page has been indexed, but will ranking potentially be hurt and to play it safe I better reduce nr of pictures? I do understand the "do what is best for the user" scenario and that is what I am doing with a lot of amazing original pictures not found on any other website. However, with search engines we obviously have to consider how they operate as well. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Mystery 404's
I have a large number of 404's that all have a similar structure: www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw. kemprugelaw keeps getting stuck on the end of url's. While I created www.kempruge.com/example/ I never created the www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw page or edited permalinks to have kemprugelaw at the end of the url. Any idea how this happens? And what I can do to make it stop? Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
What would your Seo tactic's be for this
Hiya guys... Just a quicken, So my forum, talknightlife.co.uk is currently 10th on google for "nightlife forum" I have about 15 back links, 26 page autority. Now what i'm trying to do, which everyone else is doing, is trying to move it up a couple of spots maybe to 5th or something. What would your tactics be, I'm disregarding all the crap I read in the forums etc, you guys on here tend to have the best explanation. Let it rip 🙂 Cheers guys Luke.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lukescotty0 -
Canonical vs noindex for blog tags
Our blog started to user tags & I know this is bad for Panda, but our product team wants use them for user experience. Should we canonizalize these tags to the original blog URL or noindex them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0