Auditing the Anchors You Forgot: Image Links

Auditing the Anchors You Forgot: Image Links

Image links have no visible anchor text; search engines fall back to the image's alt attribute. This creates a blind spot — alt text you wrote for accessibility may be functioning as link anchors, and at scale it can skew your distribution invisibly. A targeted audit:

— Isolate image-based backlinks and internal image links separately from text links. Most anchor tools lump or omit them, so you may need a dedicated crawl to surface alt-derived anchors.
— Check whether widely-embedded assets — badges, infographics, syndicated charts — carry alt text that is effectively a repeated exact-match anchor across every embedding site.
— Normalize alt text on assets you distribute toward branded or descriptive phrasing, since a keyword-stuffed alt replicated across hundreds of embeds becomes a concentrated, uniform anchor pattern.

The reasoning: a popular infographic embedded by hundreds of sites, all pulling identical keyword alt text, manufactures exactly the uniform exact-match concentration that text-link audits warn against — but it hides in a bucket most audits ignore.

On one hand, alt-text anchors are weaker relevance signals than visible text. On the other, their uniformity at scale is the concerning property, and weakness per-link does not offset concentration across many links.

Limitation: how much weight engines assign alt-derived anchors is not publicly quantified.

Open question: does the accessibility purpose of alt text grant it any interpretive leniency, or is it scored identically to text anchors?