Site disappears from SERPs - design change, new hosting, server outage?

[JackR]

Last Sunday a new design went live on a three-year-old site but within 24 hours my dedicated server went down due to a HDD crash and the new design was temporarily lost.

For four days the site was down and it only came back online last Friday – with a new IP address due to the change of hosting company.

Over the past few days I had started to notice improvements in the SERPs – until tonight.

The site has disappeared from the organic SERPs for ALL my keywords!

Changes over the past week:

i) New design – just the design. No URL changes, etc.
ii) New Host – I'm in the UK but I've moved the site from a UK-based hosting company to the US.
iii) Earlier today I submitted and verified the site using Google Webmaster Tools.

I should add that the site: command returns the homepage, so it's still in the index.

Interestingly enough, when I search using a US-based proxy server, the site is still returned on Page 1 in the organic SERPs for some keywords.

The obvious conclusion to draw from this is that the site has been removed from all UK-based searches, although this would be contrary to just about everything I've read on the subject of moving host.

I therefore have two questions:

1. Could the submission and verification of the site at Google Webmaster Tools have anything to do with the sudden disappearance?

Webmaster tools reports the following:

Pages from your site are included in Google's index.

No pages from your Sitemaps are currently in Google's index. Indexing can take time.

2. Is it possible that the change of IP address/host has led to the site being removed from all searches made in the UK – both google.com and "pages from the UK" searches?

I hope you guys can offer some advice.

[tedster]

You've just named several reasons why the site might disappear from the SERPs. I'd say just sit tight - and keep the server up.

[JackR]

Thanks tedster for the fast reply.

The site has been up without downtime for more than 72 hours.

That being the case, do I leave the site where it is, or move it back to UK hosting immediately?

[tedster]

I wouldn't touch it for a while at least. 72 hours is pretty short timespan, and Google's index is not an instantaneous thing by a long shot. So just let things settle out. Look for googlebot in the server logs, just to be sure it is getting spidered.

[TerrCan123]

Did you move to a US host from a UK host? I am not an expert on this but I would think Google might look at where it is hosted to determine where the results come from. If I wanted to be in UK results I would use a UK host.

[JackR]

Even more bad news this morning: the site has completely vanished from both the UK AND the US SERPs!

After three years of work, I literally can't believe it.

Can you guys plese tell me what steps I should take next.

Is it too early after the changes to file a reinclusion request?

[JackR]

After several hours of research this morning, it appears that the site has been returned to the sandbox!

site: returns the following:

Results 1 - 10 of about 369 from example.com

The homepage is listed first.

So, if I'm not banned from the index and there is no obvious penalty in place, it must be a return to the sandbox.

Hence the complete global absence of organic keywords being returned in the SERPs.

Has anyone experienced this?