This past week I have been stuck trying to fix sites for google images.
Visitors from Google images don’t tend to convert to money that easily but it’s still visitors.
First issue I dealt with is that nextgen galleries don’t seem to index into Google. I found what appeared to be the problem, an odd style tag which is put on the thumbnails. Once that style tag is removed and just regular width and height attributes applied, google images seems to start indexing the images.
The next problem is it appears Google is mis-naming the images. Instead of using the alt tag on the image as its label Google is just now pulling the label from some random text near the image. So like an image alt tagged “iguana” which is a picture of an iguana, is labeled “categories” because apparently the word “categories” which is label further up the page is more relevant to what the image is.
Google says they are doing this because people spam the alt tags, that is response from the mutli-billion dollar technology company. Just grab some random text from the page near the image, way to go.
This is kind of old news but in the photo galleries I have made myself I always used the file name as the alt tag, so the file name was always right. Since I started using these fancy third party galleries I really thought that just using the alt attribute would be enough, but of course I was wrong.
