Would this be considered cloaking and/or keyword stuffing?

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Would this be considered cloaking and/or keyword stuffing?

sentient

3:24 pm on Mar 16, 2007 (gmt 0)

If a site inserts an image, sliced into multiple parts, add keywords in the ALT tag and link each slice, would it be considered cloaking?

I noticed a lot of the sites by a hosting company does this. Here's an example, (snip). Notice at the bottom of the page, there's an image with text "(snip)" If you look at the code. The images is sliced into 5 parts. Each part with keywords in the ALT tag and linked to different URLs, as mentioned.

Would this be cloaking and/or keyword stuffing? I mean, site audience sees one thing while spiders see something else. Same with the ALT tags. The keywords don't even make any sense for the slices.

Thoughts?

[edited by: volatilegx at 3:23 am (utc) on Mar. 17, 2007]
[edit reason] let's not refer to specific sites here [/edit]

volatilegx

3:28 am on Mar 17, 2007 (gmt 0)

It's definitely not cloaking. Human visitors to the page can see the keywords/multiple image tags simply by viewing the HTML code.

Adding alt tags to images is actually part of the spec. You are supposed to do it. However, alt tags were originally designed as an alternative so that browsers unable to display images (or those with image display disabled) could display a text description of the image.

It's certainly possible to "stuff" keywords into alt tags. It's one of the "old school" SEO tricks that used to work well, but no longer really has that much of an effect, and may actually be penalized.

Slicing a large image into multiple smaller images is also common. Doing so for the purpose of having more alt text seems kind of stupid to me, but stupid is as stupid does. I don't really see how it would have much positive effect in the SERPs.