I've been running one of my sites for nearly a year now. However, for some reason the homepage has been delisted from Google, leaving the rest of the site intact. Although it's not a major issue, I'd like to know with some degree of confidence why. I suspect it's a penalty, but I'm not sure if it is or not. If it is a penalty, I have an idea why, but again, not certain. Any help would be appreciated! Thanks Dan
Was the homepage entirely delisted or did it just lose its SERP? Anyway, if it is a penalty, try to figure out what you did lately which might be in violation with google guidelines. You say you have an idea why, then fix it and submit reconsideration request
Delisted entirely from what I can tell. That's a very good point. The thing that's happened lately is a lot of downtime, but after nearly 2 weeks of submitting the sitemap, I'd expect that to be fixed. But downtime is not in the TOS. There's nothing I've changed recently though, that's the odd thing. I did have some banner advertising recently, but I removed that about 2 weeks ago. My general rule is do the right thing and hope for the best. Hopefully it will come out in the wash. Dan
People here can only stab in the dark without a URL. If you really want actionable help I'd suggest giving up your URL so we can poke around.
penalty usually lowers your serp ranking and don't delist your site/page unless your site is banned which is not the case here as your inner pages are still indexed. is your home page content unique? cause duplicate content would get you delisted. as canonical says, need the url to figure out if you had lot of downtime, it is a posibility that googlebot visited your site multiple times while your site was down and deindexed your site. if thats the case, then get some backlinks form high traffic sites which will get it reindexed in no time. top dofollow social bookmarking sites seem to work well for indexing
Now if you have been out for a year which is more than the regular webmaster I am sure you have been raising in the ranks in google SERPs. Anyway what this means you may have fallen prey to black hat seo and had others place links on bad sites banning the domain from google this is only a guess I would go over your backlinks one by one and make sure you dont see anything suspicious.
Not using any blackhat techniques, link building is done via guest blogging mostly. No hidden text in source. Content is 100% unique. Something else it could be is anchor text penalties, i.e. too many links using the same anchor text. However, I'm usually careful that this doesn't happen. Yeah, that's what I suspect. URL is http://www.envirogadget.com I checked webmaster tools, and got this message (had it for a few days now): Interesting info here about it: http://beecherbowers.com/2009/02/03/google-sitemap-timeout-errors/ Aha, got it. Site hasn't been crawled in April at all! Was fine in march, issues started at the beginning of April. I bet that's the issue.
there you go. as i said in my previous response, googlebot could not access your site as it was down. btw, i c your homepage is now indexed
Google does not like slow loading pages and if your home page take (lets say) 14 seconds to load then you are at the max. But when you add someone's banner ad, Google now has to download it as well. Any HTML 'games' or Flash/Video will take forever. Hence, the timeout. This happens with many of our dynamic sites (CMS) when someone starts adding "Advertising". Also, your site might not be "Balck Hat", but can you guanrantee that the banner as site/company isn't using it? Does your site have any PR or is it Graybarred? If it is indexed now and Graybarred, then you have a problem still, but any PR on the home page, then you will be ok. It most likely was the banner ads.
Site is now indexed and ranking as it was before. Hosting company was blocking Googlebot. Home page was PR5, but now grayed out. However, not worried about page rank as long as I have the rankings in the SERPs. Thanks all!