Logo alt text containing keywords - should it be changed?

[MadeWillis]

I've been pondering this for a while now, here is the situation:

We have a logo with a link to the root of the site in the upper left hand corner of our site, as most sites do. Our alt text is example.com - keyword and keyword.

When I first saw this I was a little worried that by stuffing those keywords in there it may have been hurting our natural search rankings for those 2 keywords. I considered removing them and only leaving example.com as the alt text. Rankings were towards the bottom of the first page for both terms and both are high volume terms in my vertical.

Since noticing this I've increased ranking for the larger of the two terms to rank in spots 3-5 (bounces around between these spots). The second keyword remains spots 9-11 (bounces around), but I've not spent quite as much time on this keyword since the traffic for the other is significantly higher. I realize that many others are noticing the yo-yo effect, but could this alt text be the reason and the difficulty ranking for these terms?

A month or so ago I noticed that the company logo must have changed about 5 or so years ago, before I was with the company. The keywords included in the alt text were actually found the the tag line in the logo, word for word.

My question is:

Since the logo has changed (really only the tag line), but the alt text has remained the same, could the keyword usage in the tag actually be hurting me?

My thoughts are that if someone were to look at the logo now, they would never know that the tag line used to include those keywords. It may look moderately spammy now. Should I remove the keywords?

This is a 10 year old domain that has not had any penalties or purchased links.

[tedster]

That would be a sitewide change for alt attributes in linked logo images. I wouldn't suggest doing that, now while you are ranking well. You just might drop off the first page.

qualifier: I don't know of anyone who has gone in the direction your are thinking about. I do know of several cases that went the other direction after the site was established. In those cases adding keywords the to logo alt tags caused a severe ranking drop. It's not clear to me whether the problem came from the keywords themselves or the fact of sitewide changes to the Home Page internal links. But my gut says don't touch it when you have first page results.