Posted by marcshor on July 8, 2015 at 6:26pm
Hi,
A marketing company I'm working with suggests putting URL's in my 
alt tags. I've always used concise descriptions, and don't understand how a URL in an alt tag would help SEO, screen readers for folks with accessibility issues, or browsers that can't/don't display images for one reason or another.
Anyone have any experience/info about using URL's in alt tags?
Thanks.
Comments
Strange Advice
I haven't heard anything along those lines ever. And it is completely out of alignment with Accessibility standards. Those don't even recommend having naked URL's in the body of your content. Much less having them read to screen readers via alt text tags.
I suppose it may be some hot loophole in SEO parsing that will likely be gone before you know it.
The only instance I have seen of URL's in alt text was a trick on an intranet to allow you to see an image's full path by hovering over a thumbnail. But, that was completely specialized use in closed app.
SEO Jiggery-pokery
I did a cursory web search and found nothing to support the idea of using image URLs for alt text. I did find objections to doing it.
Sounds like hacky SEO advice from 2005
If that works at all it probably won't for long. More likely Google will penalize you for doing something spammy. If it's bad for user experience and bad for accessibility it's never a good idea for SEO.
Weird
They're saying that the alt text should match the src? I can't even think of what that is supposed to accomplish. As far as SEO goes... Google looks at the src anyway (the filename, at least), so duplicating it in the alt just seems redundant. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en