My homepage is deindexed but no others!

Here is the situation and context.

I was making a number of sitewide changes including changing the URLs of many pages on my site to be more SEO friendly.

Last week around wednesday, I noticed that my Yahoo! traffic suddenly plummeted. I found out that my homepage was delisted and I don't even rank for the name of my business.

Now I have some traffic for obscure terms but I can't rank for my business name which is my domain name.

What do you folks suppose this is?
1.) I triggered a filter or penalty for just that page?
2.) A competitor put in a false report?
3.) A simple hiccup that *should* resolve itself?

For the record, I did NOT do the "remove URL" in site explorer.

I'm at a loss because it's been five days and the homepage hasn't been picked back up.

The site is www . sciongeneration . com

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Brian

 

Hi,

it's difficult to say without a full list of the changes you made but it's still early if you've made substantial changes - especailly if you've changed urls and anchor text. I've improved/upgraded sites and it's as though the SE's have put them on ice until they can figure out what the hell's happened. That usually takes a few crawls.

I had a quick look at the site and Yahoo seems to prefer to use the index.htm as your homepage rather than the root that you quite rightly use in your navigation. I'd check the site to be sure that you don't have an internal index.htm link somewhere, but it's more likely you have external backlinks pointing to that page than to the root.

I had a look and it's a very clean looking site and fairly well optimised and I think you should be patient stick with the changes.

Anyway, it's still early but you're right to be concerned that Yahoo isn't listing your homepage at the top of their list of indexed pages. I'd go out and get a few links to the homepage (you have very few). I'd also think about 301 redirecting the index.htm to the root ie "/", but again check to make sure you don't have any internal links to index.htm first.

Cheers,
Paz.

 

I would wait a few weeks before starting to worry. Yahoo seems to take much longer than Google to reindex.