Null Alt Image Tags vs Missing Alt Image Tags

[94501]

Hi,

Would it be better for organic search to have a null alt image tag programatically added to thousands of images without alt image tags or just leave them as is.

The option of adding tailored alt image tags to thousands of images is not possible.

Is having sitewide alt image tags really important to organic search overall or what? Right now, probably 10% of the sites images have alt img tags. A huge number of those images are pages that aren

Thanks!

[ChrisAshton]

Naturally in the perfect world, meaningful attributes should be added. Assuming you're a mere mortal with a limited number of hours in the day... the best short-term solution to this is going to be having the alt attribute applied but empty.

To my knowledge (happy to be pointed towards data showing otherwise), there's no real ranking difference between these two options. The reason I prefer to add a blank alt in this instance is because assistive technology (like screen readers for vision impaired users) are going to have a much better experience on your site this way.

If you have a blank alt, the screen readers will essentially ignore the image since they're going to read " ". On the other hand, if you don't have an alt attribute in the , it's going to read the source instead. Even a short img src is going to be cumbersome, especially if you have an image-heavy site!

[Eric_Rohrback]

Is it possible to use a script to write? Alternative option is to run a screaming frog crawl looking for all images, download into excel, and use the image file name to help create a tag. That's assuming you've named the image with something specific instead of leaving it default (eg: image4893054893.jpg). Ideally you would want to include image alt tags, and many platforms can help make it easy. Could you give a little more information about your situation? There might be a pattern you can use to update on a large scale. I would not have the same tag applied to all images, because that really doesn't help search engines understand the photo and wouldn't be useful to users who have vision impairments. If you don't have the time to do it, then hire someone to assign alt tags (virtual assistant). Screaming Frog will make it really easy to find all the image files.

[94501]

Hi Eric & Chris,

Thanks for the help. Given the size of the site, tens of thousands of pages and more than one image per average page, I guess my real question is how much trouble is this worth? I don't think the image file name is really going to reliably yield alt img text. So, about the most one could do is possibly a site-wide empty tag. Is this really worth it for organic search? Seems like kind of a phony manipulation to appeal to a search algorithm in maybe some microscopic way. But, I could be wrong, so that is why I'm asking here. If it really matters, we'll do it. But if it doesn't, would rather not. Especially when you consider the next thing will be that having empty alt img tags will some day be a small negative, right? That would be so Google of them.

[ChrisAshton]

No problem at all. To be honest, it's really not a huge deal and probably not worth the dev budget or manhours required.

In most cases with a site like this, I'd be more inclined to add good alt text for all images on the most popular pages then, as you're working through other pages throughout the life of the campaign, update the alt text while you're at it.

If you're already updating the page title or content on a page, it's not that much extra effort to do the alt text while you're there.

[94501]

Thanks, guys.

I've adjusted alt images tags on pages that really matter to me for organic. The tens of thousands of other images/pages are just going to have to chillax.