Anyone seen a penalty like this before?

I seem to have a penalty that just affects my homepage. It was a large florishing old site up until a day ago. It had sitelinks in Google too. PR 3.
All the other pages are still way up in the serps, but that one page no londer shows. Is this the start of a deindex?

 

it happens sometimes.. everything gets alright after a month or so usually..

 

In cases like that - first thing to check is that you haven't accidently done something in robot txt to stop that page being indexed.

 

Have you been paying for any links?

 

The site is clean. RObots text ok. No link buying, but links are being added presently by an SEO form. No real outbound on the site apart to Utube. In experience this sort of thing does not get better, it gets owrse. A similar thing happened a year ago, but Imanaged to get it reinstated. I think Google thought we were selling links, which I have never done.

 

I would also do a check on copyscape.com to make sure another site hasn't copied your content.

 

I would give it a couple of week to see if it is just a glitch and contact Google to see what they have to say, good luck with that!

J

 

You *** Genius. I was being copied

 

My gut feeling is that that outboung links have been added on this site. Others have acces to it. Does anyone know of a tool that will check EVERY webpage for what outbound links are on it?

 

I cant believe you got penalised for being copied though? you think the google bot would be smart enough to realise you were first..

 

I don't think it down to being copied either. If you are there is nothing you can do anyway. The only thing that seems to get these penalties is link selling. Which I didn't

 

They say you will be penalized but I know of a site that pays for links and hasn't been penalized. I even reported a site that is using a paid 3 way linking network and Google did nothing, it still has no valuable content and is still hanging around top 10 for a hyper competitive term.

As long as you are the first to publish and be indexed, the copy cats won't hurt you.

If you use Google Webmaster tools, I would check through the tools there. I had a site lose all its traffic once and it turned out the reason was an old part of the site was throwing an error. The site was on a shared host that had some PHP upgrade that broke an old application and Google really doesn't like pages that throw errors. I found the error listed in Google Webmaster Tools and fixed the error on the site and a few days later, it had hundreds of daily visitors from Google again.

 

Is the homepage still indexed?

 

All other pages are still indexed,
except for the homepage.

 

Wierd mate. I have experienced the same thing but the homepage was still indexed, it just dropped off the chart with rankings. The problem was spammy external links which got inserted by a hacker in wordpress.

 

The home page
http://www.homepageetc.com is not indexed
htts://www.homepageetc.com is but there is a problem with the security certificate

 

What you are experiencing is normal it always happen all the time just wait a few months and everything will be back to normal again.

 

What are you talking about. This is not normal for an established PR3 domain.

 

I think I worked it out.
It was a self inflicted identity crisis I suspect

 

Please explain. Same site on 2 domains?