ALT text not showing

Saw this in another forum and have just confirmed it myself.

Google is not currently giving results for the image ALT text - it is completely ignoring this text.
This means that pages with a lot of images and little text content will have much greater difficulty getting high rankings.

It has yet to be confirmed if the TITLE tag for image files is also ignored.

Gringo.

I don't know how you confirmed this because I was affraid this should happen with one of my sites loaded with graphics. I had to "hide" some small phrases behind the ALT tag because it had none and apparently Google found it. And it has a good position as we speak in the first page on a certain seach phrase.

Alright here is a good question. This relates on how to use the alt tag and effectiveness. What is the best way to code it? Or it doesn't really matter to much?

1. <IMG alt="Alt tags in here somewhere" height =112 src="images/logo_home.gif" width=104 >

2. <IMG SRC="/images/logo_home.gif" alt="Graphic of Domain thing" WIDTH=38 HEIGHT=22 border="0">

I am quessing #1 is a better way to go, just because it will take less effort on behalf of the Googlebot or any to read the alt tag. It looks a little cleaner too kind of, and seems to do the function same. But it also could mean squat!!

Ben

Robert - I'm afraid my first post missed a very important detail - Google isn't taking into account ALT text when the image isn't a link. It DOES take it into account when the image is a link. Note that it also takes it into account when you use the Image search, not the normal one.

However, for the normal search, ALT text for images that are not links is not taken into account.

Gringo.

Yup .. this happened a few days ago, with the last update. This is gonna make it very diffcult for those image only sites out there!

Let's keep in mind though that Google is not the only SE, so keep those alt attributes on your images. (It's not like they carry a lot of weight anyway).