I just noticed a competitor is using spacer images to stuff keywords. It's not a product image, just a spacer image. The URL and image tag are of this format: http://www.secondbestbluewidgets.com/second-best-blue--widgets-grease.html Code (markup): img src="http://store.whatever.com/assets/secondbestbluewidgets/second-best-blue--widgets-grease-spacer.gif" alt="Widget Grease" height="5" width="5" They rank a little bit to well for the equivalent of widget grease. I'd love for the search engines to notice this tactic but it would probably require human intervention to see the image. Is it worth reporting to Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc?
It is definitely worth reporting to Google. They have a specific rule about not allowing hidden text. You should report the issue while signed into your Google acocunt so that it guarantees the spam report is investigated. I'm not sure if MSN or Yahoo has any kind of spam reporting feature.
It is now reported to Google, I was logged in so their initial reply is in the Message Center stating that they received my report. I believe their policy is to not report back the results of their investigation but I will watch to see how their rankings do. The competitor is not doing nearly as well in Yahoo and MSN (ranked 95 and 50 respectively) so I won't bother with them.
I thought alt text was perfectly fine with Google? So is title text also against the rules in images?
bsd13 this is only against the rules because this website does this on spacer graphics that are not visible to visitors. It is considered hidden text. It is pretty much the same as if they had used text the same color as their background.
Just a thought. Spacer graphics are still images. I don't think it's illegal at all to put alt tags on those images.
Just a matter of time till google realizes this sneaky move.They have billions of dollars in technology
Is it the correct code? I try to view it to see how it looks like, but still is was viewable as an html code.