I understand that rankings can go up and down, but my site www.jasonelsworth.co.nz has experienced a very sudden and very dramatic drop in ratings.
 
It has gone from being first page for many important key word searches to very low rankings, a few examples are:

 A search on 'New Zealand nature photography' previously listed my site on the first page and is now not on the first twenty pages and even a search for 'New Zealand nature photography "jason Elsworth"' doesn't list my site until the end of page five.

A search for 'New Zealand bird photography' would previously had my site as the first listed, but now even a search for 'New Zealand bird photography "jason elsworth"' puts my site at the end of the last page.

This sudden dramatic drop in rankings seems to have occurred when I changed (June 20) to a new web host the actual course of events was as follows:
 
My new webhost company transferred my website to their server on 14 June. I sent them clear details of the procedure recommended by google in terms of waiting 24-72 hours for full propogation before taking down the old site and they told me this was done.

My new host did make a number of mistakes when transferring my site. One of these corrupted my analytics tracking script and form 14 June to 25 June (when I discovered what the problem was and fixed it) Google analytic could not collect information on my site.

My site dropped dramatically in ranking around 20 June.

On July 4 I transferred to a new host www.lunarpages.com, but my rankings remain the same.

If anyone can be of any help I would be extremely grateful.
 

Hi Jason!

I took a look at your site. I also searched Google for what I supposed were your most obvious keywords, and found your home page and links page at the end of results. It appears that you are a recipient of the -950 penalty. It is much discussed but as yet poorly defined. Theories abound, on several possible causes, such as over-optimization. I doubt it is much comfort, but you have some very good company down there; authority sites.

You have a challenge shared by all sites that are mostly image-based. Try to increase text content wherever it makes sense. This is a two edged sword. DO ramble on about your work, but write in a natural style. When text content is thin to begin with, it is very easy to overdo keywords. For example: Page Home4 is trying hard to get the keywords photograph and New Zealand noticed. It could be more natural, with less repetition, and it could be longer.

Your backlinks point to your / (index page) which has a splendid photo but is devoid of text content. The text content one would expect to read there is on your home4 page. Since that home4 page doesn't seem to have links going to it from outside, I suggest you pour the text from home4 onto your / page below the photo. (Always consistently link to /, not to index.html)

What then to do with home4? You would delete the text content from it (so there would be no duplicate content issue) substituting a sentence about how this page has moved to (link to /). After it has been indexed this way (could take a while) you'd have a choice to make. You could leave it up; 301 redirected to /. Or, if it has no outside links pointing to it, it wouldn't be radical to simply delete it (as in 404, not found). It would take a while to be dropped from the index, but since the last version would say "moved over there to /" that wouldn't be a problem.

Other than consolidation and making pages more text-rich (but not keyword dense), you could re-examine your links out. You have a lot of them. IF you discover that any one of those sites is openly selling links, either don't link to them, or nofollow your link. IF it were the case that your links page had little traffic anyway, you would have a choice to delete it. It is not passing any notable PR. Your log can tell you whether it is cobwebby, or a busy hub.

Do a search for "-950" for more ideas.

Good luck to you.

One more thing- There are some reports of sites that bounced back after making no changes.

Just recently I started getting about 1000 impressions less every day for some reason. I'm still listed well on Google but my page impressions have gone way down. I have no idea and I'm extremely confused. I understand what you are going through jelsworth.