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.
508 compliance vs good SEO re: Image alt tags
-
I'm currently in debate with our 508 compliance team over the use of alt tags on images. For SEO, it is best practice to use alt tags so that readers can tell what the image represents. However, they are arguing that these images should NOT have alt text as it doesn't add anything to the disability screen reader as the image text would be repetitive with the text on the page. I feel they are taking the "decorative" image concept in 508 compliance too far. It's intention is for images for bullets, etc that truly are decorative in nature and add no benefit to the reader. What is the communities thoughts on this? Have you ever run into scenario where 508 is attempting to ruin SEO? Usually the 2 play nicely.
-
Even if the image is decorative, it is still describing the contents of the image to visually impaired users. Here's more from Google:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en
From Google:
"The
alt
attribute is used to describe the contents of an image file. It's important for several reasons:It provides Google with useful information about the subject matter of the image. We use this information to help determine the best image to return for a user's query.
Many people-for example, users with visual impairments, or people using screen readers or who have low-bandwidth connections—may not be able to see images on web pages. Descriptive alt text provides these users with important information."
The image's decorative value is for the user to judge, it's about providing the full story and experience to all users not some.
-
Hi Rose,
Hopefully Donna answered your question already, but I want to jump in with some SEO prioritization advice.
Alt text like this can add to the relevance of the page, but minimally. It can also help your image rank correctly in image search, but that doesn't bring much traffic now that Google pulls images into its results page.
I had similar conversations with our compliance team when I worked for a university, and they had a similar perspective, that alt text should be determined by the flow of the reader rather than for small SEO boosts. The nice thing is, though, when images are important to the flow of the page, and are more likely for the alt text to support the keywords you're trying to target on a page.
In short: if I were you, I'd let this argument go, and just push for alt text on images that tell a story. There's no SEO penalty for not using alt text, and I doubt you're worried about ranking for "father and young son."
Best,
Kristina
-
I'm with you Rose. The alt tag describes the image. If you want it to include your your keywords, assuming they're some combination of "Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration" (your page title tag content), you could alter it to say "noncustodial parent with his young son". You could do the same with the file name, include "noncustodial-parent-son".
Here are google's guidelines, as conveyed by Matt Cutts, head of Google's Web spam team and defacto SEO spokesperson.
-
I'll provide an example. http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/our-publications-and-findings/projects/child-support-noncustodial-parent-employment-demonstration
On the page linked above, there is a medium size image depicting a father and son. The alt text there is "father with young son", the compliance team is arguing that the alt text should be removed as it adds no value. My thought was around changing the alt text to be more specific to the article, but even how it currently is it tells the screen reader that the image is of a father with his young son which is accurate. The compliance team feels these are decorative images - and I can't disagree more. I was hoping to find some evidence to support my case.
-
I must be thick because I certainly don't understand the statement "they are arguing that these images should NOT have alt text as it doesn't add anything to the disability screen reader as the image text would be repetitive with the text on the page. "
No, I haven't run into this problem before. Perhaps they're referring to situations where alt tags just get stuffed with keywords. Image alt tags shouldn't just repeat the text on the page or act as a repository for keywords, although that's often what you see. Image alt tags should accurately describe the image first, use keywords second and where it makes sense.
So, for example, this page has an alt tag coded for the little blue button above that depicts Roger, the company mascot (<img <span class="html-tag">alt</img <span>="Roger_blue_square"). The text "Roger blue square" doesn't appear anywhere else on the page. (Well I guess it does now!) It's a bit succinct - first time visitors might have a heard time understanding what the image represents - but it is accurate and isn't just stuffed with "Moz Q&A Community" keywords.
I'm waiting for the day when Google decides to start penalizing folks for doing what you've described above.
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
-
Multiple H2 tags
Is it advisable to use only one H2 tag? The template designs for some reason is ended up with multiple H2 tags, I realise if any think it's that each one is that are important and it is all relative. Just trying to assess if it's worth the time and effort to rehash the template. Has anyone done any testing or got any experience? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 21, 2017, 8:56 AM | seoman101 -
Yoast seo title question
I was referred to this plugin and have found it to be the most irritating and poorly designed plugin in the world. I want to be able to set my titles without it changing my page headers as well. For instance - If I set my title to be "This is my article name | site name" it will make my H1 tag read the same. I do not want or desire this nonsense. Why would they think this is something wise? Why would I want my site name on every single H1 tag on my site? How can I fix this? I only want my title to be my title. I want my H1 tag to remain the post/page name that I define in wordpress.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 29, 2015, 7:06 PM | Atomicx0 -
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 29, 2014, 2:38 PM | friendoffood0 -
Hreflang in vs. sitemap?
Hi all, I decided to identify alternate language pages of my site via sitemap to save our development team some time. I also like the idea of having leaner markup. However, my site has many alternate language and country page variations, so after creating a sitemap that includes mostly tier 1 and tier 2 level URLs, i now have a sitemap file that's 17mb. I did a couple google searches to see is sitemap file size can ever be an issue and found a discussion or two that suggested keeping the size small and a really old article that recommended keeping it < 10mb. Does the sitemap file size matter? GWT has verified the sitemap and appears to be indexing the URLs fine. Are there any particular benefits to specifying alternate versions of a URL in vs. sitemap? Thanks, -Eugene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 10, 2014, 12:26 AM | eugene_bgb0 -
Avoiding Duplicate Content with Used Car Listings Database: Robots.txt vs Noindex vs Hash URLs (Help!)
Hi Guys, We have developed a plugin that allows us to display used vehicle listings from a centralized, third-party database. The functionality works similar to autotrader.com or cargurus.com, and there are two primary components: 1. Vehicle Listings Pages: this is the page where the user can use various filters to narrow the vehicle listings to find the vehicle they want.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 30, 2014, 8:19 PM | browndoginteractive
2. Vehicle Details Pages: this is the page where the user actually views the details about said vehicle. It is served up via Ajax, in a dialog box on the Vehicle Listings Pages. Example functionality: http://screencast.com/t/kArKm4tBo The Vehicle Listings pages (#1), we do want indexed and to rank. These pages have additional content besides the vehicle listings themselves, and those results are randomized or sliced/diced in different and unique ways. They're also updated twice per day. We do not want to index #2, the Vehicle Details pages, as these pages appear and disappear all of the time, based on dealer inventory, and don't have much value in the SERPs. Additionally, other sites such as autotrader.com, Yahoo Autos, and others draw from this same database, so we're worried about duplicate content. For instance, entering a snippet of dealer-provided content for one specific listing that Google indexed yielded 8,200+ results: Example Google query. We did not originally think that Google would even be able to index these pages, as they are served up via Ajax. However, it seems we were wrong, as Google has already begun indexing them. Not only is duplicate content an issue, but these pages are not meant for visitors to navigate to directly! If a user were to navigate to the url directly, from the SERPs, they would see a page that isn't styled right. Now we have to determine the right solution to keep these pages out of the index: robots.txt, noindex meta tags, or hash (#) internal links. Robots.txt Advantages: Super easy to implement Conserves crawl budget for large sites Ensures crawler doesn't get stuck. After all, if our website only has 500 pages that we really want indexed and ranked, and vehicle details pages constitute another 1,000,000,000 pages, it doesn't seem to make sense to make Googlebot crawl all of those pages. Robots.txt Disadvantages: Doesn't prevent pages from being indexed, as we've seen, probably because there are internal links to these pages. We could nofollow these internal links, thereby minimizing indexation, but this would lead to each 10-25 noindex internal links on each Vehicle Listings page (will Google think we're pagerank sculpting?) Noindex Advantages: Does prevent vehicle details pages from being indexed Allows ALL pages to be crawled (advantage?) Noindex Disadvantages: Difficult to implement (vehicle details pages are served using ajax, so they have no tag. Solution would have to involve X-Robots-Tag HTTP header and Apache, sending a noindex tag based on querystring variables, similar to this stackoverflow solution. This means the plugin functionality is no longer self-contained, and some hosts may not allow these types of Apache rewrites (as I understand it) Forces (or rather allows) Googlebot to crawl hundreds of thousands of noindex pages. I say "force" because of the crawl budget required. Crawler could get stuck/lost in so many pages, and my not like crawling a site with 1,000,000,000 pages, 99.9% of which are noindexed. Cannot be used in conjunction with robots.txt. After all, crawler never reads noindex meta tag if blocked by robots.txt Hash (#) URL Advantages: By using for links on Vehicle Listing pages to Vehicle Details pages (such as "Contact Seller" buttons), coupled with Javascript, crawler won't be able to follow/crawl these links. Best of both worlds: crawl budget isn't overtaxed by thousands of noindex pages, and internal links used to index robots.txt-disallowed pages are gone. Accomplishes same thing as "nofollowing" these links, but without looking like pagerank sculpting (?) Does not require complex Apache stuff Hash (#) URL Disdvantages: Is Google suspicious of sites with (some) internal links structured like this, since they can't crawl/follow them? Initially, we implemented robots.txt--the "sledgehammer solution." We figured that we'd have a happier crawler this way, as it wouldn't have to crawl zillions of partially duplicate vehicle details pages, and we wanted it to be like these pages didn't even exist. However, Google seems to be indexing many of these pages anyway, probably based on internal links pointing to them. We could nofollow the links pointing to these pages, but we don't want it to look like we're pagerank sculpting or something like that. If we implement noindex on these pages (and doing so is a difficult task itself), then we will be certain these pages aren't indexed. However, to do so we will have to remove the robots.txt disallowal, in order to let the crawler read the noindex tag on these pages. Intuitively, it doesn't make sense to me to make googlebot crawl zillions of vehicle details pages, all of which are noindexed, and it could easily get stuck/lost/etc. It seems like a waste of resources, and in some shadowy way bad for SEO. My developers are pushing for the third solution: using the hash URLs. This works on all hosts and keeps all functionality in the plugin self-contained (unlike noindex), and conserves crawl budget while keeping vehicle details page out of the index (unlike robots.txt). But I don't want Google to slap us 6-12 months from now because it doesn't like links like these (). Any thoughts or advice you guys have would be hugely appreciated, as I've been going in circles, circles, circles on this for a couple of days now. Also, I can provide a test site URL if you'd like to see the functionality in action.0 -
Lowercase VS. Uppercase Canonical tags?
Hi MOZ, I was hoping that someone could help shed some light on an issue I'm having with URL structure and the canonical tag. The company I work for is a distributor of electrical products and our E-commerce site is structured so that our URL's (specifically, our product detail page URL's) include a portion (the part #) that is all uppercase (e.g: buy/OEL-Worldwide-Industries/AFW-PG-10-10). The issue is that we have just recently included a canonical tag in all of our product detail pages and the programmer that worked on this project has every canonical tag in lowercase instead of uppercase. Now, in GWT, I'm seeing over 20,000-25,000 "duplicate title tags" or "duplicate descriptions". Is this an issue? Could this issue be resolved by simply changing the canonical tag to reflect the uppercase URL's? I'm not too well versed in canonical tags and would love a little insight. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 7, 2014, 11:33 AM | GalcoIndustrial0 -
What should I cover in a SEO proposal ?
What should I cover in a SEO proposal? Is there any sample SEO Proposal template in SEOMoz?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 21, 2013, 12:04 PM | kashyaplakkad1 -
Is DOCTYPE important for SEO?
Hello fellow Mozzers. I am just having a brief look at a potential clients website before speaking to them tomorrow and whilst looking at the source I noticed that they don't appear to have a clear definition for their Doctype. All the have at the top of each page is I have to admit that Doctypes aren't my strong point but I know that they are normally slightly more descriptive than this. Can this have any effect on rankings? or is this just an issue for W3C validation? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 12, 2011, 7:49 PM | AdeLewis0