<b>Image links and the alt-text anchor most audits ignore</b>

<b>Image links and the alt-text anchor most audits ignore</b>

When a link wraps an image rather than text, the anchor does not vanish — engines substitute the image's alt attribute as the functional anchor. This is documented behavior, restated in Google's own guidance, yet most anchor-distribution audits silently exclude image links entirely.

The consequence is a measurement gap. A profile that looks comfortably branded in text may carry a hidden cluster of exact-match anchors riding inside image alt attributes — banner links, logo links, badge widgets — that the audit tool never counted.

— Widget and badge links are notorious here: a single distributed graphic can plant thousands of identical alt-text anchors.
— Because they share one template, that cluster is also maximally low-entropy.

On one hand, alt-text-as-anchor is well established for accessibility and crawling reasons. On the other, the weight engines assign to an image alt anchor versus a text anchor is not publicly quantified, so we cannot say whether a manipulated alt cluster carries equal risk.

Limitation: most third-party anchor reports under-capture image links, so any profile audit that ignores them is working from a biased sample of its own data.

Open question: are widespread badge and widget programs quietly the largest source of templated exact-match anchors on the web — invisible precisely because they live in alt text?