Hi Robert,

Thanks for your input on this.

The webmaster changed the hosting from US to Spain without my knowledge, the first I knew of it was when I saw the rankings drop and called him to see if there were any changes done to the site.

The site also seemed to be down at various times during the process and the analytics stopped recording data for 3 days.

We had excellent rankings in UK & US (both our target markets) but the day we changed host, the rankings all dropped from between 5 to 30 positions and so far are showing no real sign of returing to their original rankings even though we have now changed to a new US host.

I don't know if you have ever had the same experience but I wonder how much of an impact this will have in the long run for the rankings and will they even return without having to significantly promote the site again.

There are a number of factors which took place over this period:

1. Site was down when on old US host for a minimum of 3 hours one day and perhaps longer

2. Changed from US host to host based in Spain

3. Analytics stopped recording data for 3 days and site was down briefly after the change of host

4. New Google algorithm change

5. All original URLs now have /index.php at the end

Can it be a combination of all these factors or is there one main culprit?

I will speak with our webmaster Monday and ensure that he has set the target language to EN-US but we are also targeting the UK market and prior to this we were ranked very well in both countries.

Again, thanks for all your feedback!

Thanks all for you input!

We have done redirected the old urls to the new ones ie from www.site.com/keyword/  - to - www.site.com/keyword/index.php

We changed host on the 5th Feb. and literally the same day all rankings dropped. I know there have been recent Google updates but finding the real cause of this is still difficult. If there were no changes to the site, then I may have leant more towards a google algorithm update but the rankings dropped as soon as the sites hosting was changed from US to Europe. Hosting has since been changed back to US based.... 3 days on though and no significant improvements although some keywords are moving up 5 places or so.

Any more input appreciated

I have just had my site updated and we have put index.php at the end of all the urls. Not long after the sites rankings dropped. Checking the backlinks, they all go to (example)  http://www.website.com  and not http://www.website.com/index.php. So could this change have effected rankings even though it redirects to the new url?