Re: Alttext and Decorative Images

On 15/02/2024 10:10, Shivaji Kumar wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> A marketing group I am working with wants to use alttext for
> decorative images to improve indexing and ranking for SEO purposes.
> 
> The proposed solution is to add aria-hidden="true" to avoid any
> negative impact of this implementation for screen reader users.
> 
> Is this an effective solution? Or, are there other implementations
> that can produce equally/better results for for both accessibility
> consumers and SEO purposes?

It won't have a negative impact on screen reader users, but it's a shady 
practice at best to try and stuff extra keywords etc into your page this 
way. And there's no guarantee search engines won't start ignoring these 
sorts of attempts at stuffing extra content into pages with "hidden" 
things (anecdotally, I've already heard rumors of Google not indexing 
certain types of visually-hidden blocks of text - and they may even 
downrank pages that clearly abuse these sorts of techniques).

I'd rather concentrate on writing good marketing copy for actual users, 
instead of trying to artificially boost/game ranking.

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke

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Received on Thursday, 15 February 2024 10:26:16 UTC