Whats the best method to tackle website traffic drop?

[mutant2008]

ON 14th November following a DNS error (which seems to have been a google error as local servers were not effected and it happened to many people everywhere) my traffic started dropping. Within 5 days it was down 50%. In a panic to resolve the situation I thought it was because i was on a shared host and moved to VPS which was a disaster. Ive had server errors since.

After desperately looking everywhere for news on the DNS error and whether there as algorithm change etc I decided i should have a look at my site @ www.mutantspace.com and see if there were any internal issues.

In Google Webmaster forum a helpful moderator suggested that I do 2 things:

1. Deal with the fact that I had keyword stuffed my <alt tags="">. Basically i run an arts blog so have 8 - 10 images per post and was putting the same text in each one i.e [artists name][artform][name of artwork]. I stupidly didnt realise what i had been doing and have since been deleting my alt tags for every image except one per post. However i have 17,000 images so its going to take a while. </alt>

2. She also linked me to https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/http%253A%252F%252Fwww.mutantspace.com%252F and wondered why i had such volatile inbound links. I dont know why. And cant figure it out

As far as everything else goes I dont know what I could be doing wrong to deserve penalty - if it is a penalty. I dont back link so all my links are natural (from artists, galleries, art blogs, tumblrs, etc)

I dont sell advertising (yet anyway)

Having said that ive been told i have too many links on each page (i run a wordpress site and so have categories, etc) so im wondering if i should nofollow my categories?

In short im wondering what advice anyone has on doing a systematic shake up of my site.

Im currently doing the following:

1. deleting most of the <alt tags="">on my posts. Ive got back as far as 2012 and will keep going til theyre all done.</alt>

2. Redirecting all crawl errors

3. No Following more outbound links and links to social networks

4. Checking all inbound links to see if there is an suspicious domains

5. Sorting out the fact that ive had numerous server errors for the last 2 weeks (would that affect SERPS?)

Is there anything else i can do? Should do?

much appreciated

[FedeEinhorn]

Are you buying links? Or are you using an SEO company for link building, in the AHREFS report I saw this domain: http://www.goldiefish.ie/ which has a sitewide link to your site in the footer that says "check out mutantspace arts skills exchange providing you with free creative and production skills for your arts events and projects" that looked suspicious to me.

If you are not doing it then someone is. You should consider doing a backlink audit and possibly creating a disavow file.

Have you checked WMT for any manual action on your site?

[mutant2008]

HI Federico

Thanks for that. No I dont buy links and dont have a backlinks strategy. Everything should be natural. Having said that I dont check to see if there are any spammy links linking to me either. I have no manual actions and never have....at the moment im nofollowing more outbound links, deleting signature links from legitimate forums im on (there only a few) and clearing up spammy <alt tags="">which were basically the product of laziness as i have 8 - 10 similar images per post (paintings, photos, illustrations - hard to distinguish)</alt>

Any more advice welcome...