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Thanks both for your responses.  I think in cases such as this, it's generally a good idea to follow your instincts.

Have either of you guys tested what happens to rankings if you remove all alts except the main, keyphrase rich one?

Thanks both for your responses.  I think in cases such as this, it's generally a good idea to follow your instincts.

Have either of you guys tested what happens to rankings if you remove all alts except the main, keyphrase rich one?

Reading around the web, there are many sources that suggest all images should have an Alt tag attributed to them.  This is good for accessibility etc, however there appears to be conflicting interests between this and what works for SEO.  Hence many other sources suggest that you include a keyphrase or two in 1 image Alt tag, and then leave the rest blank so as not to dilute the alts on the page.

In my experience, the latter appears to be true.  However this seems wrong when the Alt attribute really should be used for accessibility reasons and not for SEO - why would the search engines encourage us to provide poorer quality information by harming our rankings if we try to make a website accessible?

Interested to hear your opinions and experiences on this subject.

Thanks.

Thanks all.  I do already have webmaster tools and I'm about to hit their developers with some pretty bad news - hence why I'm asking if this is absolutely essential!

The site is for a relatively large online retailer and it's just a mess really.  I think this is happening is because they have a load of include files in the top level folder, and therefore Google is reading these as individual URLs.

Is there a reason why Google punishes the entire site rather than just the related pages?  I understand they have quality control but this site gets several hundred thousand monthly visits, it's been around since 1998 and has decent Page Rank.  Surely that would override what is essentially poor housekeeping?  (obviously not!)

Thanks for your time and input, appreciate your help.

A client has a load of duplicate page titles on their site.  However, to cut a long story short, most of these pages are pointless and therefore we don't need ranking for them.

As such, I'm not concerned whether any of the pages with duplicate content on them are ranked or not..... unless having duplicate page titles / content on these pages could mean that other pages on the site, like the homepage, don't rank as high because of this.

Do I need to worry about duplicate titles on these pages, or can I ignore duplicate content on pages that I don't want to be ranked?

Hope that makes sense!