Image Alt SEO localisation

Question

How does it Google or other search engines treat images with same source but different - translated alt attribute.

<!--on English page: example.com/en/locations -->
<img src="http://example.com/img/london.jpg" alt="nice bridge" />

<!--on German page: example.com/de/stelle -->
<img src="http://example.com/img/london.jpg" alt="schöne Brücke" />

What and which language is more relevant? Does it search engines use both alt's or...

thanks

Answer 1

There are no hard facts on this, but there is no reason to think that search engines would look at different language versions when analyzing a page. On each page, they take the alt attribute as the textual equivalent of the image, and it is natural that in pages in different languages, the texts are different. So search engines use for each page the alt text that it has.

On the other hand, “nice bridge” and “schöne Brücke” are rather useless for the purposes of searching, and they are not appropriate textual equivalents of any image that I can imagine.