On Thu, 9 Feb 2006, Viken Karaguesian wrote:
Just a question: Is the text in an ALT attribute indexed by
Google/search engines?
The last time that I looked into this, the regular Google text
search seemed as if it had only indexed ALT text where it was inside
<a href="..>...</a>
Other search engines have different policies.
Google Images, on the other hand, seemed to index ALT text
more generally.
I'm curious. I see a number of sites around the 'net that use
rollover images as their navigation menu items. How is that menu
indexed/crawled by search engines?
That seems to be a different question...
If an image is used in someone's navigation menu and they provide
ALT text for it, is that text indexed?
Based on the above observations, I'd say "yes", since a menu item
would not be of much use if it was outside of <a href="..">
Of course the link has to be right there in the HTML - it's not much
use if it's only generated after executing some javascript, taking
into account that indexing robots in general won't execute javascript
to find out what happens (and I can't say I blame them).
Thanks.
Seems to me there's something behind your question, that you haven't
quite revealed. Presumably you're planning to do something (what?),
and are wondering what effect it might or might not have on being
indexed. Your apparently random reference to a rollover was some kind
of clue that there's a real question behind the one that you overtly
asked.
Maybe if you were a bit more frank about your question, you'd get a
better quality answer. But don't overlook the fact that the indexing
services are tuning their rules all the time - tuning a web site to
what we deduce they are doing currently (based on past observations)
is no guarantee of future success. If you see what I mean.
