Thumbnail Alt Text issue

[grgalex]

Hello and thank you in advance if you are reading this. I use categorygrid4 for allmost all my categories and have been penalized by google for having a duplicate link attached to my thumbnail pictures, so i have removed the href reference in the conlib and now i have no duplicate links on any of my pages. However, when hovering your mouse over my thumbnails, including product thumbnails, the alt tag does not show up when looking at the site in either firefox or ie9 unless i hit the compatibility view button. So i looked at a few of the able sites listed in the client library and noticed that they also do not work unless i hit the compatibility button as well. This leads me to believe that it is a possible site issue and as i cannot find any reference in this forum on the matter i thought i would write and ask if anyone has encountered this and knows of a solution. I was hit pretty hard by the "Penguin" page 1 to 5 and back to 2 and am trying to make any and all improvements count, and since googles webamster guidelines require image alt tags i figured it could be a considerable boost. if anyone needs to check my site it is www.discountautoac-compressorparts.com.

[jmestep]

There are a couple of category pages that do that, as you say. You can put in some conditional code comparable to the what Able does with the manufacturer display- if the catalog node type is a product, use the product url, otherwise use the catalog node url.

[david-ebt]

Is this the code you've modified to display your thumbnail images:

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string thumbnail = string.Format("<a href=\"{0}\" target=\"{3}\"><img src=\"{1}\" alt=\"{2}\" border=\"0\" class=\"Thumbnail\" /></a><br />", catalogNodeUrl, ResolveUrl(catalogNode.ThumbnailUrl), catalogNode.ThumbnailAltText, target);
itemTemplate1.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(thumbnail));

to something like this:

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string thumbnail = string.Format("<img src=\"{0}\" alt=\"{1}\" border=\"0\" class=\"Thumbnail\" /><br />",  ResolveUrl(catalogNode.ThumbnailUrl), catalogNode.ThumbnailAltText);
itemTemplate1.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(thumbnail));

If that's the code (or something like it), try adding the title tag and use the ThumbnailAltText or the product name or product code as the text.

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string thumbnail = string.Format("<img src=\"{0}\" alt=\"{1}\" title=\"{1}\" border=\"0\" class=\"Thumbnail\" /><br />",  ResolveUrl(catalogNode.ThumbnailUrl), catalogNode.ThumbnailAltText);
itemTemplate1.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(thumbnail));

Here's a link that discusses using both ALT and TITLE tags:
http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol6/html_no1.htm

[grgalex]

Wow you guys are awesome! Thank you so much for both your replies. I had to tweek it a little so the thumbnails used the title of the category, but it works great.

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                    string thumbnail = string.Format("<img src=\"{1}\" alt=\"{1}\" title=\"{2}\" border=\"0\" class=\"Thumbnail\" /></a><br />", 

catalogNodeUrl, ResolveUrl(catalogNode.ThumbnailUrl), catalogNode.ThumbnailAltText, target);
                    itemTemplate1.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(thumbnail));