Hi -- Hoping some guru can offer advice. My index page has vanished from Google, but the rest of my site is still around. I don't know if it's time to panic yet. Facts. 1. My site had and still has a PR of 5 according to prchecker.info 2. My site has dominated my keywords steadily since November 2. I did a keyword update about 3 weeks ago and refined my keywording 3. I switched Web hosts about a week ago Somewhere along the line, my index.html page vanished out of the SERPS. I don't know if it's coincidental or related to the keyword update or the new web host. I'm at hostgator.com and have my own IP address. What happens now? 1. If I type in my company name, my index page no longer shows up first hit. Now what shows up are other pages like companyname.com/sitemap.html. I actually can't seem to find my index.html page if I search for my company name. 2. If I type in the exact phrases in my meta tags on my index page, my index page doesn't show up. 3. The only way I can get my index.html page to show up is if i type in companyname.com. Then it shows up fine. AND it shows up with the latest version that was crawled two days ago. All that said, my secondary pages are all in the google index and haven't lost any SERP rankings. Is patience a virtue, or do I need to panic? Thanks in advance! Nathan
A similar thing happened to my site. I was 3rd in Google for my main keyword and then I completely disappeared, then after a few days or so I went to first in Google. It's probably something to do with Google updating. When you say you changed host, did you change the URL as well?
Are you doing site:www.domain.com/index.html ? If yes, try site:www.domain.com and you'll probably see it..... just a wild guess
Hey everyone, Thanks for the response. I didn't change URLs when I changed hosts, and I don't think the homepage was deindexed because it shows up when I type my company name into google. I'm not talking about doing a site:domainname.com search. When I do that, though, my homepage shows up and so do the rest of my pages. ??? Thanks!!
When you updated your keyword's 3 weeks ago, did you only make the changes to the main page or to other pages as well?
what keywords were you targeting before and what are your news ones? and what else did you do to the home page?
Basically I just changed the keyword density around on my homepage. I wonder if it thinks I'm spamming it?
It could be... I don't think Google pays much attention to keyword density these days..but when overdone it can look spammy.....did you overdo it will keywords in alt tags, comments ect?
umm, maybe that's it. i put a lot of my keywords over and over again in the alt tags. time to remove it all!
hi nswelton.. just limit your density 2-4%... i know that google doesn't pay attention to density but at least you have limited your keywords repetition... regards!
Make sure your meta data keywords relate and match body content keywords. Try not to repeat keywords too much and make sure that your anchor text on links to other pages uses a keyword for the page it links to.
are you using any blogging service ? It happened to me once but when I checked my homepage - the blogger was placing a no-index, no-follow tag on the homepage. So, view your html source and see where the culprit is!
If you changed your alt tags to look something like (keyword1,keyword2, keyword3,keyword1, keyword1) etc. then yes that can make a big difference especially if you have several alt tags on that page. Keyword stuffing is a no no to the SE's
crap, that's what i did. i have gone and deleted all my alt tags now, but will my index page return to the serps? and will my whole site be penalized since it was in my index page?