Keyword Specific Filter Lowers Rankings after Site Update

[jsherrod]

After we redesigned our site, exactly one month ago, I saw some fairly competitve category pages drop in ranking and now they are hovering around the 100 mark. Two weeks later, less competitive category pages got the same treatment.

The home page is still doing well for primary keywords (unless there is a category page for the keyword that is being filtered).

The primary changes to the site were this:

We doubled the size of our images.
We added Alt text to images (they were previously Alt-less). The Alt text just happened to duplicate the hyperlink text that accompanied the image.
I also discovered an "undocumented feature". The image Title attribute was added to each image and it duplicated the Alt text and hyperlink text.

It seems like this is an obvious problem due to repitition in attributes. But I was just wondering if anyone else had faced this type of filter for this type of overindulgence in image attributes. If so, what measures solved the problem? Was eliminating the Image Title attribute enough? Varying all attributes? (this would be very hard to do as these categories/pages are very specific already).

Did it need a re-inclusion request?

Gracias.

[tedster]

There's no doubt that Google will filter/penalize a site's rankings at the specific keyword level. If you feel that you were "stuffing" for a particular word and you backed off on that - then a reconsideration request makes sense. The touchy area for Google is anchor text, much more than alt attributes.

[jsherrod]

Thanks for the reply Tedster. Yeah, I didn't notice that there was so much "stuffing" going on until some of the pages started to drop.

On 3 of the categories I changed the anchor text, left the alt text alone and deleted the image title attribute. After about 8 days one of those pages has popped back in the top 10. I'm hoping the others fall in line over the weekend.

Hopefully I won't have to beg big G for forgiveness.