Competitor keyword image alt tag on their templates company logo

[Antony_Towle]

A competitor with maybe a couple of hundred pages throughout their website has recently added an image alt tag of a keyword to their company logo which links back to there homepage. The homepage is not particularly optimized towards this keyword and do not use the keyword within the text content at all apart from within the page title, So the image and link destination are not relevant towards the keyword.

They seem to rank well for this competitive keyword in our industry using what i see as a slightly unethical internal linking strategy.

We are currently working on some solid content to compete with this, but i was just wanting some advice on the situation, How does Google not see this as manipulative having the same link in the template from each page?

[Chris.Menke]

James, there are many factors that determine a home page's rankings in Google and the alt tags of images that link to it from within the site is but a very small one.  What you describe is commonplace on the web and because of that, the technique doesn't really count for much as far as SEO so I wouldn't worry about it. As long as the contents of the logo's alt tag is thematically relevant to the products/service produced by the brand, it would be considered acceptable.