John Mueller from Google stated on Twitter that your web pages can rank in Google web search for content that you put within image alternative text. He also added this is easy to test, and SEOs have over the years, by putting a unique string of text in their alt tags and seeing if Google will show the page in the search results after that page is indexed.
All the tests I've seen over the years shows Google does indeed rank pages based on the content in the image alt text. That is of course for very obscure queries but if you want to rank for something generic, alt text isn't going to do it for you. :)
John wrote "Pages can rank in websearch for content that's in image alt-attributes, so I guess that's a yes :). Easy to try out, if you want to double-check."
Pages can rank in websearch for content that's in image alt-attributes, so I guess that's a yes :). Easy to try out, if you want to double-check.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 19, 2019
We know in image search, alt text is important but we also know web search uses it as well.
Worried about spam - don't be:
Folks have been stuffing alt attributes (or alt tags as we used to call them) for a really long time now. Our algorithms have learned to interpret them appropriately :-).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 19, 2019
Forum discussion at Twitter.
