Use of graphics

Yandex’s position on images rests on one technical fact: the robot cannot yet recognise text inside pictures, and ALT text does not enter the main index. Everything else follows from that.

ALT attributes

Fill them for two distinct reasons: the text is displayed when the image cannot load, and it helps the bot that crawls for Yandex Images understand the picture. Note the limit stated above — ALT serves image search and accessibility, not the main text index.

The rule that follows

Do not use images in place of text. Where a graphic contains words, duplicate them as real text on the page, or the information is invisible for ranking. Two common cases:

• Graphic menus. The robot can follow the links but learns nothing about what the sections contain. Provide a text menu to the main sections alongside.
• Flash-built sites need a text version — for users without the plugin, for mobile devices, and for the robot.

Ranking better in image search

• Place illustrations as close as possible to the text they illustrate; where that is impossible, add a caption.
• Give files meaningful names — Yandex’s own example contrasts img_123456.jpg with cthulhu.jpg.
• Make image link text descriptive: not “Figure 1” but a description of what the figure shows.
• Block CAPTCHA and generated images — banners, charts, trackers, graphic informers — in robots.txt. These pollute image indexing and consume crawl capacity.

Where this bites hardest

Businesses whose substance lives in graphics: price lists as images, specification tables exported as PNG, infographics carrying the entire argument of a page, contact details rendered as a picture to defeat scrapers. Every one of those is a page that reads as substantial to a person and nearly empty to the engine — and the last one also fails region moderation, which explicitly requires the address not to be an image.