I have a site that is just over a year old and its main keyword is in the domain name www. mysite.org.uk I woke up yesterday to find that my homepage is no longer indexed as it was before and has been replaced by www. mysite.org.uk/index.html and i've dropped from 2nd position on page one to the bottom of page 2 for my main keyword. Does anyone have any idea how I can get my homepage listed again without the /index.html extension on the end of it. Any help appreciated.
Try to check your website using google webmaster tools from the diagnostic area to know about any major problem it is facing and try to fix it.
Looks like it's a classic case of a duplicate homepage - google is seeing two homepages www.mysite.org.uk and www. mysite.org.uk/index.html therefore splitting pagerank. To fix it either change the internal links from relatative to absoulte or 301 from your index.html to www.mysite.org.uk
Yeah a 301 redirection could surely help. I always do this thing with my new sites. It's also a good way to control the incoming links for your site to set it on the main index without the /index.html to www.site.org.uk. I'm sure that will solve your problem.
Thanks for the replies, I checked the webmaster tools and www.mysite.org.uk was an unreachable url on 16th Oct the day before I lost my ranking in google. Another one of my sites got the same treatment out of 9 sites I have with this web host. Is it possible the site was down when googlebot came round and it'll re-index www.mysite.org.uk next time? The site was position 2 for a good 8 months and never had any problems before. I'll give the 301 redirection a try. Cheers guys
i got that problem on one of my forums. it was in top 4 but now it is 42th with the /index.php. i blocked the /index.php by robots.txt but google did not think that my homepage is domain.com. yesterday i created an .html homepage and waiting the bot now. 301 can be a good try.