Site dropped from #1 to nowhere after moving servers. No warnings. Any ideas?

My company does technical support for a website that sells letterman jackets. This site doesn't do any SEO or anything since they were #1 for all their keywords for as long as I can remember. They were hosting with HostGator and there were A LOT of issues and downtime, so after the last major outage on Wednesday they've decided to move to SingleHop.

We moved the site, everything's fine. Few days in - I get a note from Rankinity saying that they are nowhere to be found for ANY of their keywords. Even the site's name. I'm getting a major WTF moment, checking them manually and it's true - they are in fact nowhere in the first 100. Google Webmasters doesn't show any warnings or anything.

WTF just happened?

I might assume it has nothing to do with moving servers, but what are the proper steps in a situation like this?

Sounds like it's a consequence of the downtime.

The fact you don't even find the site name may be *good* news, believe it or not, it means the site was temporarily completely removed but once Googlebot checks out the site, it's probably gonna return to previous positions.

Download the raw access logs and check the Googlebot activity, see if it's getting 200 OK replies or some other error code. In case of error codes, then there's your problem.

it will reappear once the G bots visit it again.
nothing to worry about

Wow, this is oddly comforting Thank you.

Force index the pages in WMT.

Go into WMT and do a fetch of the website, then once it has successfully fetched, you can submit all those URLs to the index.

When they revisit the site, they will try to index it back. Don't worry, everything will be fine.

cybersage said:

Force index the pages in WMT. Go into WMT and do a fetch of the website, then once it has successfully fetched, you can submit all those URLs to the index.

Click to expand...

Nice, I didn't even know it was possible. Thanks.