Re: Alttext and Decorative Images

I can tell you that search engines *do* have algorithms for finding hidden 
stuff that's primarily directed at SEO, and *do* use that as a trigger to 
identify a page as more likely to be clickbait or scammy SEO than content, 
which has a negative impact on ranking. And that this isn't new.

However, it has an impact on people who actually check out the alt text 
because for example they have lower but generally useful vision. If your 
customers are happy to ignore that group of people, they seem to have 
understood accessibility as a risk management exercise, not as a technical 
goal behind the Web, to be in the words of TimBL "for everyone".

It's also a bad practice because it means accessibility has to continue to 
deal with the potential situation where systems designed for accessibility 
are hijacked, meaning we need to rethink authoring advice, and rebuild 
toolchains and workflows.

So as well as search engines, people who actually work in accessibility or 
understand it and look at it will tend to consider the group who does this 
disreputable.

Hopefully, you can convince them to follow the advice of others to make 
better content rather than try to climb search rankings through deceptive 
practice, but I understand that it isn't always the outcome.

cheers

Chaals

On Thursday, February 15, 2024 11:26:07 (+01:00), Patrick H. Lauke wrote:

 > 
 > 
 > 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

-- 
Chaals Nevile
Using Fastmail - it's worth it

Received on Thursday, 15 February 2024 12:56:51 UTC