I've been trying to overcome this problem for a while now and am at a loss. Hopefully someone can help. I'm working on a site where Google has become confused as to which page should be the home page on the site and it is really screwing up the rankings. Currently, Google is not caching www.mydomain.com but it is caching www.mydomain.com/index.html. Also, The Webmaster Tools summary states that "Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Dec 3, 2006" even though the server logs show that the Googlebot requests www.mydomain.com almost daily. This site is almost 10 years old and had a Toolbar PageRank of 6. Now, the Toolbar PageRank is a 0 for the homepage even though the other primary pages on the site have a PR 5. To try to fix the problem, I have made sure that all internal links point to the www.mydomain.com version of the homepage and have 301 redirected the index.html version of the home page to www.mydomain.com. But even with this redirect, Google keeps returning results for the query "cache:www.mydomain.com/index.html" and no results for the query "cache:www.mydomain.com". I am totally stumped. Yahoo and MSN have no trouble with the site. It looks like it is simply the case that Google got confused while we were doing a site update last year and now I can't seem to get things right. Any suggestions?
www.mydomain.com is just a sample domain for the purpose of illustrating the problem. I don't actually have www.mydomain.com The problem has been happening since December.