Alt Tags Back in Black?

June 9th, 2006 by Michael Gray in Google, Grayhat SEO, Link Development, SEO

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I remember the good ole’ days when you could stuff alt tags with whole sentences and it worked like a charm, then it got killed. However recently I’m seeing more and more alt tag stuffing working.

I’m seeing keyword stuffed graphic buttons really throwing SERP’s completely out of whack. What I’m also seeing is the content of alt tags in SERP’s. In one case the search was for a company name and looked like this

Company Name
Company Name blah blah blah Company Name image blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah
www.example.com

Looking at the HTML source code you saw this


<h1>Company Name</h1>
blah blah blah ...
<img scr='http://www.example.com/image.jpg' alt='company name image'>
blah blah blah

Kinda groovy in an old school way

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4 Responses to “Alt Tags Back in Black?”

  1. pagespank Says:
    June 9th, 2006 at 9:20 am

    I’ve also seen some old school spamming clearing up in google - turn off javascript and check this out:

    http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:FIZRKovwq1wJ:www.cadillacpostcards.com/Radiohead.html+download+radiohead+sheet+music&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3

    Number 2 for [download radiohead sheet music], and #6 for [download radiohead music]. You can pretty much insert any artist in that query, with varying amounts of results like this. Slightly niche terms perhaps, but still - javascript redirects?

  2. Richard Evans Lee Says:
    June 9th, 2006 at 2:32 pm

    Wonder how stuffing the title attribute compares?

    Having been brainwashed by semantic markup cultists as a child that is usually where I let myself be verbose.

  3. TallTroll Says:
    June 11th, 2006 at 5:47 pm

    >> Wonder how stuffing the title attribute compares?

    I’ve seen pretty good evidence it doesn’t, at least for the element

  4. Natasha Robinson Says:
    June 13th, 2006 at 1:29 am

    I’ll file this under: “If you had tested it for yourself instead of believeing what all the ‘gurus’ wrote, you would have never stopped using it.”… Other than “Stop ya whining and do something about it,” the only other SEO mantra I live by is: “Don’t believe anything you read unless you test it yourself.”