RE: Alt Text and Decorative Images

I was surprised to find a number of marketing firms out there recommending the use of Alt Text to optimize searchability in search engines for their catalogue graphics. This seems to be a growing trend.

Cheers, Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: Chaals Nevile <chaals@fastmail.fm> 
Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2024 7:57 AM
To: Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk>; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: 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 13:25:10 UTC