The Other Search Engines

**SagaLore** · 10-21-2002, 11:42 PM

Was reading about how to improve rankings in Goodle, found out that google checks alt tags and it's good to have keywords in them.

Had a thought... a devious thought...

what if I were to create an image, very tiny transparent gif, maybe 4 pixels... put it way at the bottom out of the way, and added an alt tag with a long list of vital keywords? Would this significantly help my rankings?

or would google pick it up as spam?

**david** · 10-22-2002, 06:37 PM

Never actually tried this or read about it, but I would think that Google would pick that up as Spam. They seem to be quite good at it. They would probably notice:

The image was very small
There were a lot of words to describe a simple image

Personally, I think its very difficult to 'con' Google in any way. They seem to be very good at making their index fair.

**SagaLore** · 10-22-2002, 06:49 PM

Yea I love Google.

Much better than the days when I used Infoseek.

Well, I really don't want to "con" the rankings, I see a lot of the top sites in my category that use their Title for a huge list of words rather than the actual Title. I figured that I might be able to do this with an ALT tag instead...

I need to use a thin transparent image as a stud to fix a column width in my menu and I figured maybe I could add an ALT tag to it...

**TimSchroeder** · 10-22-2002, 10:45 PM

Alt tags can help, but you don't want to overdue the amount of keywords listed.

This article (while a little broad) might help you a little:

http://www.webmasterstop.com/article...t-google.shtml

**DaveTodd** · 10-26-2002, 07:01 AM

i'd say...go for it with the keywords, but don't spam them in. include maybe 1 word or phrase per image, 2 at the most. any more and you're definatly pushing into the realms of spam.

alt image tags can be a valuable commodity, they can boost your rankings. also, if you can, rename your images as keyword/phrase_imagename.gif/jpg. that way, when the search engine finds your image links, it finds keywords as well, which will further help to boost your rankings

there are still devious tricks out there if to fool the engines if you know what you're doing. good luck!!

**Gamer-Talk** · 11-06-2002, 12:03 PM

Be careful, you don't want to be penalized. Just use regular images and be specific with your alt tags.

**SagaLore** · 11-06-2002, 12:24 PM

I recently read that using tiny gif's with alt tags is BAD. Google knows. So I guess that idea is no good...

**Gamer-Talk** · 11-06-2002, 04:45 PM

Yep, google is filled with smart bastages.

**SagaLore** · 11-06-2002, 04:56 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by apaoli
Yep, google is filled with smart bastages.

LOL!

**GetNetHits** · 11-11-2002, 01:56 AM

Sagalore,

The best way for you to climb the ranks in Google would be to have several keyword rich articles on bass fishing and lures on different pages, all with a dedicated link back to your main page.
Every week submit one of those keyword rich pages to Google. See where I am going with this...? It works like a charm