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The benefits of alt tag optimization for traditional SEO has always been a "yo yo" subject for me.  Way back in the day (2004 to 2007) I believed there was some benefit to alt tag SEO.  However as time went on I saw evidence that the major search engines were no longer considering alt tag SEO as a ranking signal.

However I later had the pleasure to work on a joint project with a high end SEO firm in 2011/2012.  My colleagues fully believed that alt tag optimization was still a very important strategy for traditional SEO at that time.

Is there any evidence available that alt tags still help with traditional SEO nowadays?  I'm fully aware of the benefits of optimized alt tags and image search.  However could optimized alt tags be one of those ranking factors that Google removed due to abuse and later quietly resurrected?

Could this work for pulling PDF title/meta description SERP results?

We are trying to scrape Google SERPs results for our client's PDF webpages.   Does anybody know of an ideal search engine scraper tool that can pull the actual SERP title, descriptions and URLs?

We have a client that does multiple press releases a year.   One issue we noticed is that every press release has the same meta description tag and the duplicates are starting to really add up.  Unfortunately the client does not want to create specialized meta descriptions for new press releases due to legal restrictions (every new meta description must be reviewed).

What should we do about this?

We have a client that has an events category section that is filled to the brim with past events webpages.  Another issue is that these old events webpages all contain duplicate meta description tags, so we are concerned that Google might be penalizing our client's website for this issue.   Our client does not want to create specialized meta description tags for these old events pages.

Would it be a good idea to 301 redirect these old events landing pages to the main events category page to pass off link equity & remove the duplicate meta description tag issue?   This seems drastic (we even noticed that searchmarketingexpo.com is keeping their old events pages).  However it seems like these old events webpages offer little value to our website visitors.

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

My client is a public banking software company and recently many of their videos are unavailable to those browsers with "Safety Mode" turned on.  What elements within these innocuous videos could be triggering the safety filter?   Is there anything we can do about it?

I've already reviewed titles/descriptions and reviewed the transcripts for words like 'sex" but I can't find anything that could be inappropriate.   Is there any way around this?  Is there a process for having this status changed?

Thank you

Thank you for your reply.

Do we still need canonicals if we set the preferred domain in GWMT and update htaccess?

A Screaming Frog report indicates that Google is indexing a client's site for both: www and non-www URLs. To me this means that Google is seeing both URLs as different even though the page content is identical.

The client has not set up a preferred URL in GWMTs.  Google says to do a 301 redirect from the non-preferred domain to the preferred version but I believe there is a way to do this in HTTP Access and an easier solution than canonical.  
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en

GWMTs also shows that over the past few months this client has lost more than half of their backlinks. (But there are no penalties and the client swears they haven't done anything to be blacklisted in this regard.

I'm curious as to whether Google figured out that the entire site was in their index under both "www" and "non-www" and therefore discounted half of the links.

Has anyone seen evidence of Google discounting links (both external and internal) due to duplicate content?

Thanks for your feedback.

Rosemary

My client has a Facebook profile and a Twitter account that they have abandoned. These pages also have old branding and we would like to redirect these pages in some way to the current Facebook and Twitter accounts.

I did find this article but it's 3 years old and not sure this is works: http://www.thesearchagents.com/2011/12/how-to-do-a-301-redirect-on-twitter-even-though-twitter-doesnt-allow-it/

What's the best way to do this?

Thanks Chris:  Thanks for the idea. I use Screaming Frog all the time but in this case I'm looking to analyze 100 keywords at one time.

It looks like no one knows about a tool to do this so I'm going to close this questions.

Thank you,

I'm looking for a tool that can help us quickly identify web pages on a client's site that contain a selected keyword phrase.
I would like to enter say 100 keyword phrases and the client's URL and receive a report that shows - for each keyword - the client URLs that contained that exact phrase.

Does anyone know of a tool that can do this?

Thank you,

Rosemary Brisco

Our client has a good number of results showing up in SERPs that are search results pages produced by Blog posts. Unfortunately all these results have exactly the same Title tag and it has nothing to do with the blog content which means they are unlikely to help us much.

We can’t create a 301 redirect because there is no page to redirect. There is no blog page we can re=canonical to either.

The content on these pages is a short list of  blog posts by each author.  They are not true “Author” pages that would have a URL structure like this:  your company.com/author/joeblow

Our plan is to use GWMT's URL removal tool to request remove of these pages. (and then try to stop new results from being created)

We are doing this to get low-value content out of the SERP.  Is there a better way to remove these search results?  Any drawback in removing them in GWMTs?

Thanks.

What do you believe to be the best approach in handling blog content for employees once they have left the company? We don’t want to remove the blog posts so they need to stay, but then there are the author pages.

This gets tricky because the CMS ties the blog post to the author.

One approach might be to change the author’s name to the Company’s name to get around author pages for people no longer with the company.

It’s kind of tricky because the blog posts won’t have the same credibility if they don’t have a person’s name/photo associated with the post.  We could leave the blogger’s page and list him as a “Contributing Author” once he’s left the company.

Thoughts?