User talk:Eag227

Welcome

Hello, Eag227! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already excited about Wikipedia, you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field when making edits to pages. Happy editing! Nemesis63 (talk) 17:58, 3 August 2011 (UTC) Getting Started The five pillars of Wikipedia • Tutorial • Your first article How to: edit a page • upload an image Getting Help Frequently Asked Questions New contributors' help page Where to: ask questions • make requests Request administrator attention Policies and Guidelines Neutral point of view • Reliable sources Verifiability • Citing sources • No original research What Wikipedia is not • Biographies of living persons Manual of Style • Three-revert rule • Sock puppetry Copyrights • Policy for non-free content • Image use policy External links • Spam • Vandalism Deletion policy • Conflict of interest • Notability The Community Community Portal • Adopt-a-user program Assume good faith • Civility • Etiquette No personal attacks • Resolving disputes Build consensus • Village pump Signpost • IRC channels • Mailing lists Things to do Be bold in editing • Help develop an article Maintenance • Peer review • Requested articles Join a WikiProject • Translating articles Cleaning up: General • Spam • Vandalism Miscellaneous Categories • Disambiguity • Stubs User pages • Talk pages Useful templates • Tools • User scripts

Maria Sachs

Please explain how the image alt description ("alt"), which is a requirement, is affecting SEO.

Alt text should describe the photograph. Imagine you're trying to explain what the picture shows to a friend over the telephone. You can't say "it's a picture of John Doe", unless everyone is bound to know who John Doe is. Instead, you put something like "A middle-aged man in scruffy clothes, carrying an axe, standing by a tree" or whatever. I suggest you read WP:ALT.

--Nemesis63 (talk) 18:08, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Assuming that by "SEO" you mean "search engine optimisation", you have misunderstood the nature of Wikipedia. Editing to promote a subject is not permitted, and continuing to do so will lead to being blocked from editing. JamesBWatson (talk) 20:27, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

As can be seen through my response to Nemesis63 on his talk page, the edit was not intended in any way to "promote" the subject. It was simply meant to prevent the alt image description from displaying upon a standard search of the subject's name via a search engine. As I'm sure you'd agree, the alt image description is not in any way helpful to a user if displayed in search engine results. I am not aware of any other way to remedy this without removing the alt image description. The edit was not performed in bad faith, or to affect the content of the article, and I invite you to rectify the concerns that prompted the edit in another way. Eag227 (talk) 23:19, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

OK, it seems that "promote" was the wrong word, and I apologise. However, when editing a Wikipedia article, the only concern should be what is best for that article, and how the article is edited should not be shaped to suit what happens in external search engines. JamesBWatson (talk) 13:58, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

That's fair, though I would distinguish between editing article content and editing something like an alt image description. Use of an alt image description is far from universal (see, for example, main pictures for "black forest cake" or "Albert Einstein"). In this particular case, the alt image description was doubly problematic, since her Wikipedia search result was essentially highlighting her descriptive physical features instead of pertinent, official information. This is a reasonable concern accounting for the way in which most users access a page, not intended in any way to bias or distort the effective dissemination of knowledge. Eag227 (talk) 14:26, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Conflict of Interest

Hello Eag227. We welcome your contributions to Wikipedia, but if you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest or close connection to the subject.

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