Google Images Discards Alt Tags

Yes, as the title suggests I have strong reasons to believe that Google Images has stopped taking the alt tag into account while indexing images. I have earlier written about a possible Change in Google's Image algorithm. That was written based on the sudden drop in traffic in one of my site Actress Snaps. My site used to get more than 60% traffic from Google Images now its reduced to just 10%. This led me to see where the traffic was going from the image search.

Since the site in question is a celebrity phot site, I used to host most of the images in Photobucket. I do have a pro account there. But then later stumbled upon Shareapic.net which was paying their users a share of revenue. No need to say I slowly started hosting the majority of my images in Shareapic. They paid me 50$ the first time and from surprisingly from the next time onwards they started paying me only 40% of what I was entitled. I had a payout of 20$ but they paid me 8.92 dollars. It looks they have changed their policy for foreign users and I am from India. Anyway let's comeback to the real issue. On closer examination I found that the shareapic hosted images were not receiving any or minute traffic from Google images compares to Blogger host or Photobucket hosted.

My first thought was that Google may be penalising those paid to upload image host service. But that argument never made sense. So I took a even closer examination and found out a fundamental difference in Shareapic and Photobucket. If you have hosted your images in Shareapic, you have noticed that whatever name you give to your file while uploading thay change it to a random number. Whereas Photobucket never changes the file name and retains them. Now we all considered the two important factors with images were filename and alt tags. So for all the images hosted in Shareapic I used to use alt tags cause the filename was a random generated value. Earlier these pictures used tom have enough traffic from Google images but now they have dried up. Hence I believe like the title tag Google looks like have taken a decision not to use Alt tag, ot atleast they consider the filename as more important and alt tag as a cross verification factor.

We can only hope that a host like Shareapic, which gives unlimited bandwidth and space may change their filenaming system. Otherwise the only option looks like put the first two images in a gallery in Photobucket and the rest on Shareapic.

Continue Reading...