SEO

I'd like to see your opinion on this:

any image files within content areas automatically reflect the title of the post and add _1, _2, _3, etc to the end of each name.

I'm sure most people see images.google.com as one of their major referrals, but with this, it could be much higher.

Manipulating image names used to be a major way to tricking the search engines several years ago.

Nowadays you need to be careful that you don't get flagged for over optimization. Your ALT text will play a role in whether or not the images show up in Google images as well.

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
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it isn't really over optimization if the images titles match the thread (or a variation thereof)... Imagine someone writing a story about Joe Shmoe and uploads pictures from random sources titled IMG23298423.gif, because the person writing it has no idea of the need for the images to have titles. Even if it did it to a set number of images converted. (which was configurable per page)

I understand that alt plays a role, though not nearly as significant of one as image title. I would think Google would pay attention to the alt text more if it didn't match the image name, but why not have the option to do both? Especially if it's a simple hack.

I think everyone is too scared to upset Google, honestly. If you're running a quality site that delivers exactly what it should there never should be an "over optimization" penality.

How can Google penalize someone for being extremely well organized?

P.S. Great product, and great location Joe.

Note: I didn't notice the first time that you had stated within "content areas".

FYI - We do support rewriting our thread attachments in various configurations like this in the vBSEO Control Panel.

Just for discussion, it is also possible that an image contained within an article, is not accurately described by the title of the article.

Imagine a thread about the "increasing # of celebrities being sent to jail".

The article might have shots of Paris Hilton, Wesley Snipes, Nick Hogan, or perhaps R Kelly.

Would the thread title accurately describe each of these images? I guess it would depend on what the photos contained: mugshot, picture getting booked, glossy 8x10 given out by their agent, etc.

What else could we do?

It's possible for images hosted locally, that we could even find other dynamic ways to assign them filenames and/or ALT text such as using statistically significant phrases found in proximity to the images location within the content, etc.

Recently, our team has been discussing how the images could be handled better with vBulletin. It's possible a new process could be added that simply gives users the capability to tag, describe, title, or otherwise better describe the images they post, etc.

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
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yeah, almost like google's "image match" game, you could allow members to tag a photo.

It would be tough to differentiate between threads that NEEDED tags and those that didn't because vbseo usually deals with absolutes, but if we can get our head around how to best display automated image titles/tags I'd be pleasantly impressed

It has to be a lot of fun working on vbseo, the possibilities are virtually endless with what can eventually be done with it.

It sure would be nice to have a dynamic image alt tag or title for these randomly inserted images based on thread name, certain keywords defined by the admin that are typed in the post.

Even giving the poster the oportunity to title the pictures using javascript or an extra space next to the "upload attachment" area would be nice.

At this point, these pictures are nice to view, but they are doing absolutely nothing for my SEO.

Sam

I agree, I would like to see alt tags for images within posts. Multiple images..1,2,3,etc...