This was previously tested in the SIA but James wanted to retest this after reading the article in Twitter. When John Mueller was asked if adding images to your web pages would help you rank higher and he responded: “no automatic effect’ contribute to ranking”.
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Transcription below:
Will adding images to your pages make you rank higher? There's no automatic effect from adding images. And I think the key to this statement is actually automatic effect, like, I have the page with no images, and then I put 5 images on it, and it will automatically rank me. Doesn't, this is actually I would use a true statement.
Alright, so this test was done by James, and he provided you the set up right here in case you want to check it out yourself. But here's the starting position, 1, 2 and 3 images. That's the natural progression, right? three images went up to number 1, the 2 disappeared, there's 3 images high at the end of the test. So I mean, what can you really draw from this? That 3 images got the biggest gain from the start to the end.
If you're looking at this purely from what the data shows us right off, then one image or three images is better than one and three is better than two. So more is better. Now, if we look at his setup, let me check here if it annotates.
Doesn't say if he set the alt tags in his testing pages. And this isn't one of our tests, this is James's test. So I don't want to typically go to the page. Yeah, so I can't go to the page itself and click on things because that'll mess up his test if he's still monitoring it, right. But it doesn't say if he set up the alt text.
If the alt text has all 3 of these higher, if the old texts had all three of those higher, or had all three of those with the exact match in the alt text, they could change the keyword density of the page, right? And then this page should, in theory, because we know from the keyword density test, go to the highest position, and it will probably go to one in order.
I have to assume that he just test the image, there's no image related directly to this particular keyword. So you're not going to search that keyword and find an image of a flat cover that sucks, or whatever, right? So Google vision or Google Ads is not going to be helpful. So the only thing you have is the association with the alt text and the text around it.
I think that's why this is kind of a mixed bag thing. So we know more according to this more images is better. But what if this one image had the alt text set and none of these that and the other two you. Would this shoot up over the other ones?
That's kind of a I would call this tests probably a wash. It's interesting to know. But we kind of did prove John Wright. There is no automatic effect. We didn't put it on there and then they all rank higher because we had more images. So that's pretty interesting. Any questions on that one? Okay, no questions.