What causes rankings to drop while moving a site.

[Syed_Raza]

Hi, we recently moved a PHP based site from one web developer to another (switched hosting providers as well).  Amidst the move our rankings drastically dropped and our citation and trust flow were literally cut in half as per Majestic SEO.  What could have caused this sudden drop?

[donford]

Switching host you are then switching DNS which would force the spiders / crawlers to re-find and re-index the new location.

This should be of little concern unless you notice a traffic decreases as well. Your page rank and domain authority will drop but that is just temporary and indicative of the fact that re-indexing based on new DNS is not instant.

Other things that could effect rank in cases like this are:

New Urls -> were old urls kept? if not were they at least canonicalized?
New IP, did your domain have a static IP before? If so, then you must have got new IP which if the previous site using it had bad mojo ie somebody used it for malware or other nefarious activities you may inherit that bad juju.

Hope this helps

Don

[Syed_Raza]

Thanks Don! I'll look into that