Design-and-SEO question that never gets discussed for adult: do you write real alt text on your thumbnails, or leave it blank? on a mainstream site alt text is standard for accessibility and image SEO, but on an adult tube people seem to either ignore it entirely or stuff it with keywords. i lean toward genuine descriptive alt text because it helps image search and accessibility both, but i cannot say i have measured a traffic difference. so is descriptive alt text on adult thumbnails a quiet win worth the effort at scale, a keyword-stuffing trap, or just noise nobody should spend time on?
small real channel, not a growth lever, and the trick is descriptive not stuffed. image search does send some adult traffic, less than web but not nothing, and honest descriptive alt text helps you show up there. stuffed alt text does nothing and reads as spam to the crawler. at scale, generate it from the data you already have, the title and tags of that video, so it’s accurate per image without hand-writing thousands.
generate it from the data you already have, the title and the tags, is the only version that scale without turning to garbage. hand-writing alt text for thousands of thumbnails never happen, and a generic stuffed string help nothing. pipe the real per-video data into the alt and it come out descriptive and accurate for free.
on the wordpress side the decent media plugins auto-fill alt from the title, so at scale it’s a checkbox not a project. easy free win, even a tiny image-search trickle beats nothing for zero ongoing work. the only wrong move is leaving it blank or letting a plugin stuff it with keywords.
before anyone spends real effort on this, measure whether image search actually sends you traffic, because on some sites it is a rounding error and on others a real trickle. check the referrals in your analytics, and if it is meaningful, do the descriptive-from-tags version, and if it is nothing, do the cheap plugin auto-fill and move on. do not optimize a channel you have not confirmed exists for your traffic.
the real risk is people hear alt text helps seo and cram it, which does nothing and reads as spam. it’s a small honest channel or it’s noise, there’s no version where stuffing wins. describe the image straight or let the plugin do it, and spend your effort on levers that actually move.