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There are no alt tags in urls and ‘alt’ is not a tag it is an attribute of an element

What would you consider Google should be picking up on as keywords for this page?

Should it be avatar images? Is Google picking up this word due to it occurring most frequently?

As things stand alt=”avatar image” is a poor use of the img alt attribute if anything it should really have been left as ‘alt=””‘

If a patch were to be submitted, as Paul suggests, what would/should be the string to output in the alt tag, as these are members probably the only option really is the user name any thing other than that would be as equally wrong as the current state.

This is an interesting and valid issue, and actually has a solution as follows:

The alt attribute has a deliberate and important purpose, first and foremost it is NOT something designed for SEO purposes that is a secondary benefit[sic] The alt attribute serves to provide; text only readers, users browsing with images disabled, and most importantly! those who have to use assistive devises with a descriptive passage of text to replace the image. This is why the ‘alt’ atttribute is a mandatory requirement for img tags and failing to provide one fails the absolute basic accessibility validation of a site.

Thus given what the images are for with those images disabled the text replacement would need to read along the lines of ‘Paul’s avatar image’ it’s not so much a SEO issue as respecting the fact that we do have to observe that there are those less fortunate than the majority and who deserve equal access to the resources of the internet and all of which was part of TBL’s vision for the web and the reason we have the WACG

@djpaul Paul if a patch is added it probably needs to be ‘[username] avatar image’ not sure it can get better than that but the present output isn’t right and would be better left as an empty string.