October 6, 2006 I was very recently asked by a friend about alt tags in reference to using them to increase keyword relevancy. I answered, and she wanted to know if it was bad to stuff them with keywords (really funny that she should use the word ‘stuffing.’ You’ll see later), and if so, how bad. I hope this helps explain it. Alt tags were created and implemented for Internet browsers that don’t see images, and used by those with seeing disabilities. So, if I am blind, and I go to a site, my computer will tell me what the picture on a site is (whatever is written in the alt tags). The code is as such: Being that this is a function for the greater of the Internet, a lot of search engines looked at this tag for a number of reasons. First, no search engines can see images, so they use that tag to tell what the image is. Second, and Google is known for this, a proper alt tag would reflect positively on a website as it shows the intent of it’s creator by accommodating the disabilities of some web surfers, thus making for a better online community. Because of the search engine’s view of this tag, we used to (used to as in a long long time ago) be able to stuff the alt tag with a lot of keywords and such for higher rankings. The search engines thought that if «hey, they have a picture of a car on this website,» proving further that the site was relevant to the term ‘car.’ The search engines caught on rather quickly, and now will actually penalize for such offenses. The only thing they want to see in the alt tag is a very short, very specific description of that image. It is a common method to place the description tag, or a lot of keywords in the alt tags. This, by definition, is known as «keyword stuffing.» It’s a giant no no in SEO. The search engines are seeing a large repetition of the description tag exactly as it is written in the meta. This on copy alone is bad. They are also seeing that every alt tag is the same. So they ask, «why does this site have the exact same picture on the page so many times? Oh, I don’t think it does. Nobody would do that. So I deduce that this site is just stuffing the terms. Oh wait, it also happens to be the description tag. Let’s stamp that with our ‘Seal of Disapproval’.» Google also sees this as taking advantage and misusing a function that is in place to help those who need that help. Hence the severity in which they will sometimes penalize.

So, Unamed Friend, to answer your question on stuffing the alt tags. It is bad.

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