We are seeing the same on the Australian Google and we are a start up (3 months old) by we are still climbing in rank, so it has no adverse effect on us.

We host some sites on GoDaddy but find as far as SEO goes, it is very limited. If you are looking to rank for a long tail keyphrase it may get you somewhere, but the tools of SEOMoz are far more tuned. The onpage in the campaigns here give much more detail than the seo reports on GoDaddy and they are instant. So, you can make some changes and test your onpage with out waiting for 12-24 hours for GoDaddy's email. I have found their 'website protection' is useful for detecting quirks that pose security issues.

When you look at the wording you get an idea of what they are offering 'to improve search ratings'. So if you are on page 50 and they get you to page 48, they have improved your ratings. No-one will find you, but your rating has improved. If you want good rank, work with a good SEO to get your site where you want it, and be patient.

From a developer's point of view: If you do not already have the new system in place, I would suggest a MVC move rather than aspx on the dotnet platform and put a cfm handler in place to map the pages at the controller level. Goggle will not know know there has been a change and you site will perform much faster. Microsoft is tending to move away from the aspx to the more structured mvc version anyway.

Have a look at this article http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067225/Google-Does-PDF-Other-Changes it explains some of the doc library search for pdf files and Google's statement here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/picture-of-thousand-words.html.

Quite the opposite, these are very desirable if used for their intended purpose.

The Alt tag is for accessability handling, so it helps people with visual disabilities to understand the content of a picture.

The Title tag is used to provide tooltip information to the user when they hover over the image.

Both these enhance the user experience as thus are looked on favourably by Google.

BUT, it's an important but - seo's in the past would stuff these tags with useless spammy content. e.g. You have a automotive business so the alt tag:

'car gmh fast cars sports cars red cars porsche' that is bad.

'Our new sporty red porsche makes an easy ride through the windy roads of Denmark' - good

The title tag could say 'Porsche 911 2005 touring the roads of Denmark'

It's all about adding value to the site for the user not manipulating the search engines. So, use alt tag to describe the item in detail and the title to provide extra details. Do not have the same text in both as they have different purposes.

Hope that sheads enough light on the subject.