RE: Alt text and SEO

It always depends on the context of where or how the image is used (not the image itself),
For example, if the image is in a database or list of images from which a user can choose to use it, then it's no longer "decorative" while in the list, even though when used on a separate page it could be identified as such.
Context is also important to SEO.

Regards,
Phill Jenkins
Accessibility Executive, IBM Design
Equal Access toolkit and accessibility checker at ibm.com/able/<https://www.ibm.com/able/>
linkedin.com/in/philljenkins/<https://www.linkedin.com/in/philljenkins/>

From: Bristow, Alan <Alan.Bristow@elections.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, December 6, 2022 9:07 AM
To: Tom Shaw <tom-shaw@hotmail.com>; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: Alt text and SEO

Hi Tom, Generally speaking, hiding content and exposing it in a special way "for SEO", can lead to problems. Google, and other search engines (SEs), use their proprietary and much protected AI and other crawling intelligence to look
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Hi Tom,



Generally speaking, hiding content and exposing it in a special way "for SEO", can lead to problems.



Google, and other search engines (SEs), use their proprietary and much protected AI and other crawling intelligence to look for pages trying to nefariously "game the system". When a page is innocently trying to do something "special" to better SEO, the SEs tech' may interpret this as a "bad" actor and lower the rank of the page.



Generally, natural is healthy and good. If an image provides meaning, then it is included and is described with ALT etc. It is decorative if you deem it as unimportant to the meaning of the content -- without the image the content would have the same impact.



So providing ALT etc for non-decorative images is good for all users, including SE bots, and cleanly treating as decorative images that are indeed decorative, is best for all audiences.


Regards,

from Alan
. . . . -   . . - - -
Alan Bristow ( he / him / il )
Web Developer / Développeur Web
Elections Canada / Élections Canada
alan.bristow@elections.ca<mailto:alan.bristow@elections.ca>
________________________________
From: Tom Shaw <tom-shaw@hotmail.com<mailto:tom-shaw@hotmail.com>>
Sent: Tuesday, December 6, 2022 9:56 AM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org<mailto:w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: Alt text and SEO

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Hi all.

I had a client query about image alt text on decorative images relating to SEO. They're obviously coming at it from an SEO perspective only. They're happy to null alt them for WCAG/accessibility purposes, but still question the SEO benefits. I know that including alt text may also contribute to image SEO, yet we hide them using the alt attribtue. So, my question is, will a null alt nullify any SEO ranking for said images? Should we not worry about it? Is there another way of hiding the image that I am missing that will hide the image, but still have the alt attribute? Or am I thinking too much into this? Apologies I have very little knowledge on SEO and how it actually works.

Much appreciated as always,

Tom