Do search engines index alt attributes on unlinked graphics?

This test will seek to determine if search engines index alt attributes on unlinked graphics.

Testing Methodology

The following unlinked graphics contain alt attributes. These attributes can be seen if you drag your mouse cursor over the graphics.

Evaluation Methodology

Drag your mouse cursor over the test graphic to view the alt attribute. Search for the unique string in the alt attribute in these search engines. If this page shows up in the search results, then that search engine most likely indexes alt attributes on unlinked graphics.

Search Engine	Expected Result
Google	No
Yahoo	Unknown
MSN	Unknown
AltaVista	Unknown
AllTheWeb	Unknown

Caveats

This page was put online on 20 April, 2004. It will take some time for each search engine to crawl and index this page to make this test "live."

The second test graphic was put online on 11 May, 2004 to correct an improper usage of the term "tag".

A malicious person could link to this page using the unique string in the alt attribute as link text. This would force a false positive on most search engines and invalidate the test results.

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