I have recently taken over JohnDalysDiscountGolf.com to try and boost traffic and SERPS. The site is basically all images. The first thing I did was to add the alt attribute to each of the images so that google would have something to read when crawling the site. After adding the alt tags I dropped from 14 to 19 in google when searching for John Daly. I would have thought by throwing "John Daly" into a few of the alt attributes it would have boosted me a bit. Thanks in advance.
I think it is due to the sandbox theory. That it will take Google some time before you gain back the ranking.
it a normal thing one day your site goes up, the other - down You should have no worries about that, just keep impoving your site!
It is usual for Google to change some ranking on your site, the data refreshes and have a google dance in some of the data center.
If what you did was add the same alt-text to all the images, regardless of what was on them, that would explain it: looks spammy. So make sure you only have the words 'john daley' on images that actually depict that (perhaps the logo or someting). Get the other pictures to rank for what they are about in google image search by putting in descriptions of what is on the picture.
You have made changes on it, so meaning your site needs to be crawled and reindex...just wait and it will show up after bots crawled...
when you make some changes to your site content or start getting new backlinks, that changes your ranking. wait for few days or more to see whether it climbs back up or keeps going down.
not so true part of the sand box effect is unstable SERP results Google has a way to see if someone have made a big change in a web site and then, even if was an old site, it will put it into testing again. so my advice, next times when you update your site, update your inner pages, and not your home page it might help you to make your home page SERP rank more stable
i think google looks at alt text the way it does meta tags dont over spam alt text with john daly if you have 10 pics use john daly 2 - 3 maybe with other words as well try naming them john daly golf, john daly club, golf club, or something try the free ibusinesspromoter programme. its only demo so wont reveal answer but will show with a orange box what is wrong. just play around with it until the box goes. i use it and its great
Has your site been cacahed yet? You have made changes meaning your site needs to be crawled and reindex... If it has it may be because you used the same keyword over and over again - spam - try alternating or combining keywords with relevant text