Google seems upset that I took their advice. [Titles and alt tags for images.]

[vdms]

Hey all,

I accidentally posted this as a private question and now want to post it publicly due to some updates (for the worse.)

I'm a photographer and the site I'm talking about is my portfolio site. It is very image heavy and had basically no text. Those who have consistently beat me (positions 1,2, etc.) in SERPs for my key search phrases have a modest amount of text on their pages.

I'd been doing OK in SERPs (top 3-5 for my key search phrases) over the past couple years and my site has decent age and domain authority (a good number of relevant inbound links from extremely reputable sources over the years, etc. etc.) [In case it matters, my root domain has a PageRank of 4 and I have a couple internal pages with PR5.]

For years I resisted adding any text because I was trying to obey Google's rule to design "for people, not search engines."

Over the past couple of months, though, I got some advice on the SEOMoz webinar about adding (relevant) alt text and body text, and also read Google's Webmaster Central article about giving images good titles and alt tags, so I decided to take the plunge about ten days ago.

I went through the site and added modest amounts of relevant text to pages where it was appropriate and where it didn't detract (too much) from the design. I made sure my images had sensible human-readable alt tags that were descriptive and made sure not to do any keyword stuffing.

Finally, I edited some of my page titles so that they were a little more descriptive. Again, nothing extreme or radical or spammy.  (But overall, esp. from Google's perspective, there were some fairly significant changes in a short period of time.)

Well.. you're all already guessing what's next. As soon as Google saw these changes, I tanked pretty badly. I went from position 3-5 on my key phrases to positions like 16-25 and spent a few days in those positions.

Now I'm just gone & buried somewhere in Google's boneyard. My latest ranking report for today shows me "not in top 50" for any of my key phrases on Google.

I'm #1 for many of those same terms/phrases on Bing and Yahoo. (Always have fared very well with them.)

Google's webmaster tools says my sitemap is OK and most of the URLs submitted are in the index.

Please tell me this is temporary, while Google deals with my changes? (Actually don't, just tell me what you really think.)

Thank you all...

[Highland]

When you say "image heavy" define that. How many images are on a page? If you had, say, 100 images on a page and added alt text to all of them, it could be seen as spammy.

[vdms]

It varies depending on the work I am doing at the moment but generally 10-20 images maybe?Never more than 20 I wouldn't think, except on rare occasions (big premiere, etc.) ... if you look in my profile under "my portfolio site" you will see a link to the site.