28 replies to this topic

[compar]

Google seems to have figured out how to discount and/or penalize invisible links from transparent .gifs, so you are correct that alt attributes on those, probably won't help.

Jill,

What evidence do you have for this. We use to use this device -- invisible .gifs -- and we removed them all. But very recently -- last three months -- we put them up pointing to a brand new site. To my amazement Google has found them and reports them in the link: search.

BTW the linking page has a PR of 4 or better.

[Jill]

I have seen sites that were obviously penalized and their only crime was invisible links to doorway pages.

Jill

[compar]

I have seen sites that were obviously penalized and their only crime was invisible links to doorway pages.   

Jill

So was the "crime" the invisible link or was it the fact that it was going to a "doorway" page? Or by doorway page are you only referring to the index.html page.

[claybutler]

I've been using alt tags for my own as well as my client's image intensive sites( photographers, musicians, etc) for years. Google does index and factor in it's SEPR's an alt tag if it's a link of some kind also. %100 sure on this one. It's a good usability practice too.
Clay

[Scottie]

So was the "crime" the invisible link or was it the fact that it was going to a "doorway" page? Or by doorway page are you only referring to the index.html page.

The invisible link.

A doorway page is not meant to be seen by people- it only exists for search engines. Your home page is not a doorway page.

[Jill]

If the page with the invisible link was penalized, then the crime was the invisible link. If the doorway page was also penalized, then that would be the crime.

If I remember correctly from seeing these things, both were usually penalized to a certain extent.

Jill

[compar]

I have seen sites that were obviously penalized and their only crime was invisible links to doorway pages.

Jill

Ok. This time I have read what you said carefully. You said "their only crime was invisible links to doorway pages". This does not say their crime was either invisible links or doorway pages.

If you mean what you say "invisible links to doorway pages" then you have not responded to my question. I talked about using invisible links. The links I mentioned do not go to doorway pages. Doorway pages were never part of the discussion.

And Scottie, I know the difference between a home page and a doorway page, but the only way I could understand Jill's answer as a response to my question was if perchance she was using doorway page in some type of generic sense, meaning the first page on a site. I had never heard her use it this way before and that is why I asked the question.

[qwerty]

I can't say that I've specifically seen sites penalized for invisible links. After all, it's not as if penalized sites are labelled with an indication of exactly why they were penalized; you kind of have to look them over and draw your own conclusions.

However, there is the official word from Google's terms of service:

Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

[Jill]

Bob (Compar) what are your invisible links for? The kind they penalize are the kinds for doorway pages. They don't care about an invisible link to a counter script or that sort of thing.

Invisible links to other sites you're trying to promote, those they would care about.

But I couldn't tell you what kinds of penalities I've seen and for what exactly. I've looked at hundreds of sites over the years and very often just briefly. Heck, I might not even have been right when I say there were penalized for invisible links. It appeared as if that was the reason, but we all know that nobody knows for sure except Google.

In years past I never saw apparent invisible link penalities. In the past year I have seen what appears to be invisible link penalties.

Hope that clarifies things for you!

Jill

[compar]

I can't say that I've specifically seen sites penalized for invisible links. After all, it's not as if penalized sites are labelled with an indication of exactly why they were penalized; you kind of have to look them over and draw your own conclusions.

However, there is the official word from Google's terms of service:

Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

I agree it is almost impossible to tell, and I know they are supposedly in non compliance. And I further know that people have reported that Google is looking for these links and will potentially penalize a site for using them.

But what I am saying -- and this is not meant to be a recommendation to use invisible links -- is that within the last three months someone in my company put up some invisible links to a brand new site.

I didn't even I know this had happened until I saw them reported by Google's own 'link:' search. When I saw them reported I visited the linking page to see where the links had been put and it was only after I couldn't find them that I asked and found out that they were in fact invisible.

What I am trying to report and comment on is that despite all the conversation to the contrary it appears that Google is not looking for or detecting invisible links. Because surely if they were making any effort along this line they would not have indexed brand new links of this type.

Now the dilemma. I'm working to make the new site as popular as possible as quickly as possible. Not an unusual undertaking. These links although invisible are from a site with a good PR and whose content is closely allied with my new site. I am convinced that these links are adding value to my new site in Google's eyes -- they do nothing for any user. So do I immediately take them down in the name of compliance? Or do I wait until my new site is doing better and then take them down? Or do I leave them in place until I'm convinced that I am being penalized for them?

[qwerty]

This is nothing more than conjecture, but you say this is a pretty new site. I imagine googlebot followed the links and indexed the new site before it registered that these links happen to be invisible.

If the content of the two sites, as you say, are closely allied, why not put up visible links and get rid of the risk?

[compar]

This is nothing more than conjecture, but you say this is a pretty new site. I imagine googlebot followed the links and indexed the new site before it registered that these links happen to be invisible.

If the content of the two sites, as you say, are closely allied, why not put up visible links and get rid of the risk?

I knew that was the next question. The sites are closely allied in content but quiet opposite in their philosophical approach to the subject They are both about blue widgets but one is for and the other against. Hence the impossibility of making the links public.

In any case I'm going to have the links removed, but I thought it was interesting that Google does not seem to be doing anything to detect this practice yet.

I find your conjecture about registering the links before figuring out that they are invisible unlikely. The name of the gif right in the code is "hidden.gif". Pretty hard to miss.

[WizardofX]

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I really disagree with WizardofX on the indexing of ALT tag text in the search engines -- at least in Google. Here is my experience. On one Website I manage, I had a logo image at the top of the page with unique text in the ALT-tag. When this page showed up in Google, the description used was actually text found in that ALT-tag; the text was used nowhere else on the page.

Because the search producing this result was for a word used in this ALT-tag, the word in Google's "description" was put in bold-face, which I believe means it was used in their relevance algorithm. At least it was indexed and recognized. When I replaced the ALT-tag text for this image, the new text showed up the following month in the "description" area when I searched for a unique word in the new ALT-text.

This was just two months ago. Since then, I have paid a great deal of attention to writing keyword-rich text for all ALT-tags, and have noticed most of these pages gaining in position. Of course, many factors could contribute to this rise in ranking, as we know, but you'd be hard pressed to convince me not to continue this practice.

This of course would not be bad news, but good news, since we all need more ways to stick in our key words. If indeed Google is picking up non-linking ALT tags, and didn't pick up mine, we need to study the problem further. The things that could make a difference in my experiment is:

1. My image is only 10 x 10 pixels, and is just a button, not much information is contained therein.
2. My image is near the bottom of the page.

but

3. All 50 pages that have this image are ranked 4+
4. They have been there for over two years.

Let's work together to get to the bottom of this.

love,
wiz :balloons:

[WizardofX]

More data, this time an inadvertent experiment or two.

I was cleaning up my web site and noticed that my logo, which is at the top of the page had an obsolete alt-tag, which was put on about 3 years ago. There are at least 20 pages from 1 to 3 years old that had this alt tag. Since the logo is at the very top of the page I thought that it might be indexed.

So I did a quick search on Google and Altavist for the phrase, and neither had
it indexed.

In these pages there was no link on that logo. On another image there was
a link to our homepage and the phrase is indexed.

I did another search that was sure to pull up the page with the logo,
including a word that should be highlighted in the logo alt tag. It wasn't.

My conclusion is still that non-linked alt tags don't count for much in Google.
Even when searching for images using words out of the alt tag didn't bring up the logo.

It may be that if you have too many words in the alt tag it isn't used to index the
image. (this has 6 words)

So I can't understand results that vary!

Best regards
mark