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
-
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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
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
-
Htaccess - Redirecting TAG or Category pages
Hello Fellow Moz's, We have an issue redirecting some /TAG and /Category pages to inner pages. As an example we use: RedirectMatch 301 /category/Sample-Category(.*) https://OurDomain.com.au/New-Page//$1 That works well. The issue is we have other categories and tags that are named similar to /Sample-Category As an example, if we try to redirect /Sample-Category-1 to /New-Page-1 - it will not work, and redirects to /New-Page I assume this is because /Sample-Category is already being redirected, so anything after /Sample-Category like -1 or -2 or -3 etc, will not be recognized. Anyone know of a workaround?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jes-Extender-Australia0 -
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 | | seoman101 -
M.ExampleSite vs mobile.ExampleSite vs ExampleSite.com
Hi, I have a call with a potential client tomorrow where all I know is that they are wigged-out about canonicalization, indexing and architecture for their three sites: m.ExampleSite.com mobile.ExampleSite.com ExampleSite.com The sites are pretty large... 350k for the mobiles and 5 million for the main site. They're a retailer with endless products. They're main site is not mobile-responsive, which is evidently why they have the m and mobile sites. Why two, I don't know. This is how they currently hand this: What would you suggest they do about this? The most comprehensive fix would be making the main site mobile responsive and 301 the old mobile sub domains to the main site. That's probably too much work for them. So, what more would you suggest and why? Your thoughts? Best... Mike P.S., Beneath my hand-drawn portrait avatar above it says "Staff" at this moment, which I am not. Some kind of bug I guess.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
How to maximize CTR from Google image search?
I'm getting good, solid growth in my Google SERPs and Google search traffic now, but I do notice that 70% of my high ranking search results are images and the CTR on those is only 3-4%. All my images are illustrative and highly relevant to my travel blog, but I guess that hardly matters unless they get CTR so people see them in context. Has anyone seen or done any good research on what makes people click through on Google Image Search results? What are the key factors? How do you optimize for click-through? Is it better to watermark your images or overlay label them to increase likelihood of click-through? Thanks, Tony FYI the travel blog in question is www.asiantraveltips.com and a relevant Google search where I rank highly is "songkran 2016 phuket".
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Partial duplicate content and canonical tags
Hi - I am rebuilding a consumer website, and each product page will contain a unique product image, and a sentence or two about the product (and we tend to use a lot of the same words in different ways across products). I'd like to have a tabbed area below the product info that talks about the overall product line, and this content would be duplicate across all the product pages (a "Why use our products" type of thing). I'd have this duplicate content also living on its own URL's so they can be found alone in the SERP's. Question is, do I need to add the canonical tag to this page, since there's partial duplicate content on the product pages? And if I did that, would my product pages go un-indexed?? I understand how to handle completely duplicated content, it's the partial duplicate that I'm having difficulty figuring out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Rel=canonical tag on original page?
Afternoon All,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jellyfish-Agency
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?0 -
Does City In Title Tag Inhibit Broader Reach?
I use our city/state in the majority of our title tags and consequently we do very well locallly for the majority of terms on our ecommerce site. I'm wondering however, if this "localized" optimization will inadvertently affect our keyword rankings outside of our city/state? If a keyword query does not include our city or state, would Google interpret our titles as less relevent and therefore move other results ahead of ours? The city/state is last in the string on the title: Blue Widgets - Our Company in City, State Thanks for any insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links
Hi! I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL: www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated. My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates? Can I fix all this with the canonical tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0