Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Will robots recognize ALT tags in Imagemaps?

Danny Sullivan (danny_at_calafia.com)
Fri, 31 Jul 1998 09:49:38 -0500 (CDT)

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> Does anyone happen to know if the search engine indexing robots used by
> yahoo, metacrawler, infoseek, etc. will access and read ALT tags in the
> "AREA" markup of imagemaps?

DO: AltaVista, Infoseek, Lycos do. DON'T: Excite, HotBot and I
believe WebCrawler no longer does. Checking on this.

Yahoo isn't a true search engine, and MetaCrawler depends on other
search engines, so the answer isn't applicable to them.

A chart listing these type of answers is at
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/features.html

FYI, that chart will be updated and expanded sometime next Monday,
assuming I get all my work done over the weekend :)

Regardless of ALT text indexing, it's an exceedingly bad idea to
depend on it to make up for the lack of body copy, if you care about
performance in search engines. I'll spare everyone more details about
this here -- that's what the Search Engine Watch site is for!

danny

-----------------------------------
Danny Sullivan
Editor, Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com

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