Image Alt Text: Do I Need to Link my Image for it to Count?
-
Hi
I learned from a very senior SEO that I must link my images if I want Google to read my alt tag for my images.
I don't believe this though... is it true?
If the answer is not true (which I suppose it is), then maybe you can help me answer this:
1. was he confused or why would he tell me this?
2. i didn't know what i should do so now, whenever i embed an image on my blog posts, i just link them to the blog post in which the image shows... in essence, by clicking the image, the page gets refreshed.
does this sound like a good strategy for images?
thanks in advance!!!
-
Paul,
excellent response. thank you so much.
i use Yoast SEO plugin. Why do you say the yoast image 'redirect' is not the same thing as I am doing? It seems like the exact same?
Ben
-
Agree with Francisco!
if this senior is your BOSS lol i have had a boss in one of ex company i worked for! THe only difference is he called himself an expert!
-
I'm with Francisco - whoever told you that is flat out wrong.
The alt tag in it's purest function is to provide a text description of images for vision-impaired page visitors. It is designed to be read by screen-reader software so the visually impaired can still understand what the image is and how it relates to the rest of the page. There is absolutely no reason a link would need be included in order for the alt attribute to do its job. Put another way - the alt attribute is applied to the img source tag. The link tag (href) is totally separate.
As far as what you're doing now, the link is totally extraneous and would probably annoy/confuse a user who though clicking on a linked image should actually take them somewhere else.
Unlike Francisco, I strongly suggest, unless you're linking to a larger version of the same image, that you simple include no link at all. Having it link to its attachment page in WordPress is also a very bad idea as that creates huge numbers of very thin-content pages which give no value to the visitor, cause major site-crawling problems and are worthless if they get ranked in image search.
There's even a setting in Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin to handle this issue by redirecting the attachment page back to the original blog post the image appeared on. (Note this is not the same as what you're currently doing) Again, if Wordpress, simply set None for the link URL.
Hope that makes sense?
Paul
-
-
I think he may have been confused. I have never heard of that. The img alt"" attribute works for SEO, but I have never heard that you needed it to <h ref="">to something in order for it to work. </h>
-
Don't do that. You're just creating loops.
If this senior SEO is your boss, then just link it to the regular image as it's done in WordPress. It won't hurt anything.
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Regarding Internal Links
I analyse my Birthday Page "https://www.giftalove.com/birthday"with comapare link profiles and found that total Internal Link 47,234. How my internal link suddenly increse. Please provide my details about my internal links.
Technical SEO | | Packersmove0 -
Not all images indexed in Google
Hi all, Recently, got an unusual issue with images in Google index. We have more than 1,500 images in our sitemap, but according to Search Console only 273 of those are indexed. If I check Google image search directly, I find more images in index, but still not all of them. For example this post has 28 images and only 17 are indexed in Google image. This is happening to other posts as well. Checked all possible reasons (missing alt, image as background, file size, fetch and render in Search Console), but none of these are relevant in our case. So, everything looks fine, but not all images are in index. Any ideas on this issue? Your feedback is much appreciated, thanks
Technical SEO | | flo_seo1 -
Squarespace Images
Hello, working on a squarespace website and I can't see any gallery images being indexed, only blog images. Searching for the problem in Google seems to imply that Squarespace images in galleries can't be indexed due to the use of a CDN. Is that the case? Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Can I redirect a link even if the link is still on the site
Hi Folks, I've got a client who has a duplicate content because they actually create duplicate content and store the same piece of content in 2 different places. When they generate this duplicate content, it creates a 2nd link on the site going to the duplicate content. Now they want the 2nd link to always redirect to the first link, but for architecture reasons, they can't remove the 2nd link from the site navigation. We can't use rel-canonical because they don't want visitors going to that 2nd page. Here is my question: Are there any adverse SEO implications to maintaining a link on a site that always redirects to a different page? I've already gone down the road of "don't deliberately create duplicate content" with the client. They've heard me, but won't change. So, what are your thoughts? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Rock330 -
Toxic Link Removal
Greetings Moz Community: Recently I received an site audit from a MOZ certified SEO firm. The audit concluded that technically the site did not have major problems (unique content, good architecture). But the audit identified a high number of toxic links. Out of 1,300 links approximately 40% were classified as suspicious, 55% as toxic and 5% as healthy. After identifying the specific toxic links, the SEO firm wants to make a Google disavow request, then manually request that the links be removed, and then make final disavow request of Google for the removal of remaining bad links. They believe that they can get about 60% of the bad links removed. Only after the removal process is complete do they think it would be appropriate to start building new links. Is there a risk that this strategy will result in a drop of traffic with so many links removed (even if they are bad)? For me (and I am a novice) it would seem more prudent to build links at the same time that toxic links are being removed. According to the SEO firm, the value of the new links in the eyes of Google would be reduced if there were many toxic links to the site; that this approach would be a waste of resources. While I want to move forward efficiently I absolutely want to avoid a risk of a drop of traffic. I might add that I have not received any messages from Google regarding bad links. But my firm did engage in link building in several instances and our traffic did drop after the Penguin update of April 2012. Also, is there value in having a professional SEO firm remove the links and build new ones? Or is this something I can do on my own? I like the idea of having a pro take care of this, but the costs (Audit, coding, design, content strategy, local SEO, link removal, link building, copywriting) are really adding up. Any thoughts??? THANKS,
Technical SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Is it okay to use anchor text almost exclusively for inbound links?
We are not spammy - each link is earned through a long process of relationship building and targeted guest post writing. Because of this, we like each link to have anchor text and they don't point to the same page or have the same anchor text. Is this still something to be worried about? Do we still need to include plain URLs (wwww.example.com) for some of those links?
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
How to get rid of back links?
I would like to clear all of the links linking to us to start over fresh? Our site has become non existent on Google with no messages or warning from them through webmaster tools. From tools on here and other sources it indicates that we should be ranked ahead of our competitors or atleast comparable. We are not found under the keywords that we use to be...."parts washers" "part washer" industrial cleaning systems etc.. our site is www.vortexpartswashers.com. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | mhart0 -
IFRAME WIDGET - FOLLOWED LINKS
<iframe style="border: 2px #CCCCCC solid;" src="http://www.cpsc.gov/cgi-bin/javascripts/cpscrss.aspx" title="CPSC RSS Feed" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" width="224" height="258"></iframe> That is the code my client wants to add to an internal page where we can keep updated news on a specific subject. Only problem is this widget has links within it, these links are "followed". Should i worry about these links being followed? There are quite a few, does anyone know if they will be counted if within an iframe or is there a way to add "no-follow" attribute to them. Can i somehow tell the HTACCESS to add no follows to all links on specific pages? Any thoughts, solutions are greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | waqid0