Google says adding alt text is important while linking to images

Google’s John Mueller did a hangouts session as he does quite regularly at Google. Same as every time he does a session, we got quite some interesting things and revelations about search. During this session, someone asked him a question about regular links compared to image links. The question was regarding alternate text inside images.

Here is the question: ” Image links versus regular links. Because we, I want us to link to the other websites that we have but showing the logo so it’s more user-friendly and that people can see it and not only have a text link to that domain name. Would it still be okay to have it the link in the image?”

On this, John Mueller answered that “Sure. What I think is is useful there is either that you have the text link as well or at least that you use the alt attribute for the image to kind of give us the anchor text that you want to be associated with that link.”

This basically clears that alt text are important inside an image. This not only helps when the image is broken but it also helps Google determine where the origin of that image is from. While it does not matter whether you have linked the website on that image or just written alt text, you need to mention something.

However, we should also tell you that this is not particularly new that Google has told to its users. Since the time that Google Search was established, site owners are told to add an alt text inside their images so that the users are made aware of where the image was from. This makes it clear for readers to attribute the correct source of an image and it also helps to credit someone for their work.