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Subject:Re: Web Page Appearance From:Ginna Watts <gwatts -at- PIM -dot- BC -dot- CA> Date:Mon, 20 Jan 1997 10:31:02 -0800
At 07:43 AM 1/19/97 +0200, you wrote:
>I am personally a great believer in using ALT tags. Use them all the time.
>But I recently saw a posting either here or on my Web development list
>which stated that this creates a problem with at least some of the search
>engines. It seems that the search paradigm used by the spiders adds the ALT
>definitions, at least those found in the opening part of a site, into the
>database. For this reason, the poster said that they have gone to defining
>all ALT tags as ALT="".
There are now some search engines (HotBot in particular) which allow you to
search for graphics, multimedia items etc. These in part use the ALT tag to
identify graphics. However, people searching for your site will not get the
graphics in the found items list unless they have requested this.
There are other ways of 'fooling' search engines (robots.txt comes to mind)
than to leave the ALT tag blank.
Ginna
Ginna Watts
Pacific International Mapping Corp.
gwatts -at- pim -dot- bc -dot- ca
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