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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

Ok, if you can get all high quality links then great! But the reality is trying to find sufficient high quality links to get top rankings can be challenging/expensive so the next best thing is to mix it up with lower quality links to bulk things out.

Link diversity does help, so that's generally why a good approach is to mix it up. Diversity has a number of benefits so it should be part of your SEO campaign.

Good luck

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?

My site was ranked very well in the UK & US for multiple keywords but we changed hosting from the US to Spain and since then the rankings in the US & UK have dropped between 5 to 35 positions on all keywords and are showing no signs of returning 3 weeks later.

What can be causing this?

The site was down for about 3 to 5 hours a few days before we transferred hosting (this is why we changed hosting due to the previous hosting being down too often).

It does seem as though the new location of the hosting server seems to be affecting rankings but I need confirmation on this or any other ideas why the rankings may have dropped.

Thanks in advance

Ok, if you can get all high quality links then great! But the reality is trying to find sufficient high quality links to get top rankings can be challenging/expensive so the next best thing is to mix it up with lower quality links to bulk things out.

Link diversity does help, so that's generally why a good approach is to mix it up. Diversity has a number of benefits so it should be part of your SEO campaign.

Good luck