Alt atributes (HELP NEEDED!)

Hi, I am managing a small ads website in Spain. Every ad has the name of the person advertising himself, a title, some text and a profile picture thumbnail.

Right now, the profile picture thumbnail and the name serve as a link to a profile page. Both together in one <a>

Before, I didn't have the images in the code with an img attribute and in total I had only one link pointing to the profile site. I changed the coding of the pictures to show them as img files with an alt attributes. The alt attributes where then the same as the link text (the names). The day after I did that, my rankings and traffic dropped by 50% and it hasn't recovered yet. (It has been 4 weeks now)

I am not sure if this was really the reason but it somewhat looks like ti to me.

I am now thinking about taking the alt attributes away, leaving them empty.
By doing this I wouldn't then have any picture with an alt attribute on the ads page.
Do you think this would be a good idea?

I tried to look at my competition but they all do it in a different way.

The number 1 in SERP has 1 link pointing towards the profile picture. In this link he has a thumbnail pictures with the ad's title + some keywords as alt attribute, the title as text + 20 words of a paragraph within one <a>.

The number 2 has 2 links pointing towards the profile page. One as the picture with an alt attribute but without real keywords in it and another text link which is the name of the person advertising.

Number 3 only uses images as a link, no text at all...

Any idea what you think I should do?

Thanks a lot for any ideas or advise.
Alex

Your drop is not about the alt tag for sure. Google aren't that fast to move your position "the day after" your change. Alt tag is good for SEO especially for the google bot because he can't read "images" so it's definitely not a bad idea.

Your fall are probably another factors, competitor backlink, lost of backlink/referring domain etc

ahriyu said:

Your drop is not about the alt tag for sure. Google aren't that fast to move your position "the day after" your change. Alt tag is good for SEO especially for the google bot because he can't read "images" so it's definitely not a bad idea.

Your fall are probably another factors, competitor backlink, lost of backlink/referring domain etc

Click to expand...

Hi, thanks for taking the time to answer. I am talking though about link in images that have a linking text right next to them. Don't you think they should be treated differently than images without a text link?