ALT Tag Labels that Use Near Duplicate Text-SEO No, No???

[Kingalan1]

Greetings Moz Community:

About 280 pages of my 650 page commercial real estate website are listing pages. Each listing page contains between two and five photos, each with a corresponding ALT tag.

My developer has set up the labeling of the ALT tags in the following manner. I can create a label for the first photo, but each subsequent photo automatically gets the same label plus a number tagged to the ALT. Like this:

alt="Flatiron Loft for Rent"
alt="Flatiron Loft for Rent - Photo 0"
alt="Flatiron Loft for Rent - Photo 1"
alt="Flatiron Loft for Rent - Photo 2"
alt="Flatiron Loft for Rent - Photo 3"

Is this method neutral, positive or negative for SEO? I am concerned that this manner of labeling ALT tags might risk triggering a duplicate content penalty. In early July I migrated the site from Drupal to Wordpress. We  changed the URL structure (adding a sub-directory) for the listings at that time. Google is refusing to index about 100 listing pages. Any chance the ALT tags are contributing to Google's reluctance to index the URLs?

I might also add that images are hosted on Amazon's CDN.

A sample listing URL is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/278-21st-street-flatiron-loft-for-rent
Note: (/listings/278) were added to the URL in July, representing the listing sub directory plus the listing number.

I Look forward to hearing the opinion of the MOZ community!!!

THANKS!!!
Alan

[maestrosonrisas]

I think that is not good for seo as it can over optimize word Flatiron Loft for Rent. If you have problems of time to alt all fotos it correspondent description i you will give the same name to all of them i would just label one with keyword and the other a would just use a name that you dont want to get the risk of being penalized for.

[StephenForde]

It's not duplicate content it may however, be considered as keyword stuffing. Mix it up. _Loungeroom of Loft for Rent _etc.

Did you set up 301 redirects for your old pages/urls ? Check GWT for broken links and resubmit a sitemap.

[MoosaHemani]

I doubt the duplicate content penalty from this but yes this is not a healthy practice as you are trying to stuff the keywords by adding one alt tag on all images on that page.

Ideally your system should have the ability to denote Alt tags to all images separately so that you can change the Alt image tag for each image when it is required!

Hope this helps!

[Everett]

On the sample page you provided it would be much better to label the photos with alt attributes like this:

Main image:Flatiron Loft for Rent

Hallway View for Listing #278
Window Views of City for Listing #278
Etc...

The point being to describe what the image is instead of worrying about what keywords to use.

What you're doing now probably wasn't the cause of a major traffic drop, but it probably isn't helping much either and there is a possibility that it could be seen as keyword stuffing.

[viatrading1]

Hi,

I know this post is a bit old, but just got into a similar situation.
I have series of product images (on an eCommerce website), that are all showing the same product in different ways.
In this case, the real description would be like:

alt="Clothing Load 001"
alt="Clothing Load 002"
alt="Clothing Load 003"
alt="Clothing Load 004"
alt="Clothing Load 005"

But, since this might be considered keyword stuffing according to the posts above...
Would it be better to just give an ALT tag to the first image, leaving the rest without an alt tag?
Looking for similar keywords looks time-consuming since each product might have 50 images.

Thank you,

[Everett]

Could you give the main/featured image a custom alt attribute, and let the rest share a format like you show above? So like this:

alt="Blue Cotton Tee by Billabong"
alt="Alternate Billabong Tee Image 002"
alt="Alternate Billabong Tee Image 003"
alt="Alternate Billabong Tee Image 004"
alt="Alternate Billabong Tee Image 005"

I would not leave the rest without an alt attribute.