Hi, I have a 2 year old website that used to rank really well. Just yesterday I noticed that the index page isn't on the searches for most of the keywords. Only the subpages rank well. What do you think happened? Here is my site: insurancebyjohn.com
I've had this happen twice, most recently in July of this year on a reasonably prominent domain. In each case, the problem appeared to be that Google got confused as to which page on the domain was the homepage. The most recent time it happened, we started seeing problems after a redesign of the homepage. Shortly after the redesign, our home page PR dropped and no longer showed in any Google search results other than searches for the domain name itself. Searches for 10 word phrases of homepage copy only returned sites that were scraping our content. This seems to be the case with your index page as well. After quite a bit of sleuthing, we discovered that Google had indexed a .swf file from the old homepage and according to the toolbar PR, was giving it a higher PR than our homepage. Our assumption was that Google was treating the .swf file as our homepage and since there were zero lnks to that file and a small amount of indexable content, it was not being displayed in the SERPs. Based on this assumption, we 301 redirected the file to our base domain. Shortly after that, our homepage rankings were restored. The previous time this happened to me, Google began treating a secured version of our index page as the homepage. Again, redirecting that page to the non-secured version corrected the problem.
Thank you for your help - yes, I did do a recent redesign of the website. How do you do a 301 redirect? Also, does it matter if the index file is index.htm or index.html? How long does it take to go back you think? Thank you
You can perform a 301 redirect in PHP or by using an .htaccess file. A quick Google search should turn up plenty of tutorials for doing this. It doesn't matter what type of file you use for the index page (.htm, .html, .php, etc.) but I would use your .htaccess file to redirect all homepage URLs to www.insurancebyjohn.com to be safe. Right now I can access your homepage at insurancebyjohn.com, www.insurancebyjohn.com, insurancebyjohn.com/index.htm, and www.insurancebyjohn.com/index.htm. And there may be more that I am not aware of. The www.insurancebyjohn.com has the most backlinks so that is the one you want to make sure the engines get directed to. Also, I would check your server logs to see if Google keeps visiting any files from the old version of your homepage that are no longer in use on your site since this may indicate that Google is treating that file as your homepage. As I mentioned above, this is what happened on our site with a Flash presentation. If this is in fact the problem, then depending on how often Google indexes your site, I wouldn't be suprised to see your rankings return in a matter of weeks.
So, how would I make sure that the search engines see: insurancebyjohn.com and not the index files or the other vesions? Maybe I can pay you to help? So, you think this is just temporary ?
I'm sorry, I should have been more clear. If my diagnosis is accurate and the correct page or file is identified and redirect, your rankings could return in a few weeks. If not, then it may be many months or more before Google corrects the error. You would direct the search engines to the correct URL by using your .htaccess file to perform a 301 redirect on the other files. For example, adding the line "Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.insurancebyjohn.com/" (without quotes) to your .htaccess file will tell your server to redirect the page index.htm page to your correct homepage. You can read more about using .htaccess on the page below: http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/301-redirects-www-non-www-canonical-problems.html Honestly, I am not very familiar with Apache or PHP so I'm sure you can find someone more qualified to help you out with the implementation than myself.
So, do you think I should wait a couple days or do you recommend just reverting back to my old website? Thank you
Reverting to the old website might not do the trick if the page that Google thinks is the homepage is still accessible but if you are losing money because of this, it is worth a shot. I do suggest adding the redirects no matter which direction you go because it is good SEO practice on any site. I also suggest signing up for the Google Webmaster Tools service (free) and verifying your site there. Here you will be able to see crawl errors and other site indexing problems. You can also see the last indexed date of your homepage. If this date is substantially different from the cache date of your homepage in the Google SERPs, it is another sign that Google has become confused as to which page on your site is the homepage.
It looks like the googlebot crawled today and yesterday.... is that good? If anyone can please help, I'd be willing to pay. Thank you
Im having a similar problem.. my PR3 homepage with 60,000+ backlinks has dropped off google and all my other pages are fine. Here is the wierd thing! My search engine traffic jumped by 30% even without landing my big homepage keywords!
i have also same problem with mine...i was first on the most hardest keyword for my product and my index page just dropped from search and its still indexed. I try to remove all changes and when i removed my english folder(which was added at same day) google backed me on first page but only for one keyword and on 9th place. Reason to rank bad is understandable because all my important links point to index page, but strange thing is why google do that. I think in my case reason is when i created english folder i create exactly same page with same name on only different language and google robot was confused when he tried to crawl. Geckojohn please pm if u get any new for ur website
This happened to my site too!! Its drivin me nuts.... I worked so hard on the site for 1 year straight.... got 1st page rankings for the last 5 months..... then I added a bunch of internal links to the homepage, and now everything is messed up My subpages rank for keywords my homepage was ranking for....... only they rank on like the 10th page which is basically the abyss...... My homepage only comes up for my company name....... and once in a while I see it for 1 out of 15 of my targeted keywords
Here is some problem with your site on home page. Remove this error in page. (1) Validate your by W3C tool, Here is 15 Errors, 2 warning(s) show. (2) Alt tag in with targeted keyword, no all keywords (3) Change all meta tag, means that Title, Keyword and Descrition.