Site dropped rankings when changing host from US to Spain

[authoritysitebuilder]

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

[RyanKent]

Hi Peter,

There are many questions which need to be addressed regarding this issue.

• What search engine are you using exactly? Google.com? Google.co.uk? Google.es? Bing? etc

• Have you made any geographical settings in Webmaster Tools?

• Is your site language specific? Do you offer a single language site? Or is it divided by country /uk, /us, /es?

• If you only offer one language, which country is it focused towards?

Your hosting country is an indicator of your site's target audience. All things being equal, I would consider a site hosted in Spain to be less relevant to a US searcher then a comparable site hosted in the US. This factor can be offset by ensuring all other country-specific indicators are set properly.

[Catalyste]

You should also check for Canonical redirection or if you had any redirection in place and if it's still working. As state below I strongly believe that depending of the target market of your site the geotargeting is better when your hosted in the country your targeting.