You may have noticed a couple days ago I published a blog post called “Image Post Test” that included nothing but a picture of a dog. That was part of a test I was conducting to determine whether the title attribute of an image has any impact on SEO. It’s always struck me as odd that the alt attribute has impact on image SEO, but the title doesn’t, especially since the title is visible to users.

Anyway, for the test I took a picture of a dog that’s never been published before on the web, and included it in a new blog post with a nonsense title that doesn’t return any results in Google. You can see the keyword below:

The post has been live for about 3 days now, and the post has been indexed, but so far the nonsense word still doesn’t return any results. An image search reveals that the image has not been indexed yet, though, so I’ll leave the post up for a few more days to see whether the image being indexed has any impact on the keyword.

It’s looking doubtful at this point that the title attribute will have any impact on the search results, but I figured I’d put my failed experiment out there anyay. People always post successful experiments, but rarely failures, which is a shame since there is a lot we can learn from failures as well. Experiments like these testing conventional wisdom are rarely successful, but it’s always good to test our assumptions, especially if the source of our assumptions is the word Google.