Problem! I just started working on this one site that is very well established, been around for years and has lots of good inbound links. A few days ago I noticed the homepage at www.domain.com was no longer a 5 or 6 as it usually is, but it dropped to ZERO! However, all the interior pages still have good PR, and in fact if I access the homepage by going to www.domain.com/index.html (its not actually .html but no matter) than it has a PR of 6. I think the problem is that all my internal links point to www.domain.com/index.html rather than just www.domain.com. This is something I was going to change, but maybe I'm too late? So to restate, my "homepage" is a zero but is a 6 if you type in the filename. What gives? What's worse is that suddenly my homepage no longer shows in Google for my company name, but an interior page of my site does instead. I don't believe its an issue w/ too many links having the company name text in it. Any ideas? If I change all the internal links should I get my PR and rankings back for the homepage or will I be waiting another 3-4 months? I don't so much care about the toolbar PR but I'm concerned maybe Google indexed both the www.domain.com and the www.domain.com/index.html and maybe hit me for a duplicate content filter or something?
You are right about where the site links are pointing to - PR from internal pages is going to index.html and external links pointing at the domain. I have exactly the same case on a site (just not on the homepage). Either way I would fix it. It can only become a bigger problem later. I personally doubt it would impact it, although I am not offering to back that claim
Thanks for the input. The other funny thing here is that the number of pages indexed by Google has been decreasing over the past couple of weeks. I think this may be related to the same issue? It's especially odd b/c we've actually added many pages recently and have seen gains in the number of pages indexed by MSN.
That Im not so sure about.. just look through your site carefully and watch where the spider can and will follow. Put external links to the new pages. Also for your index.html problem - try linking to both versions first and eventually moving it over.
All the inbound links to our site are just to the www.domain.com. That was indexed for years. Its only our internal links that reference the actual file name.
I meant make the internals point at www.domian.com but leave a link to index.html too, if you notice the PR etc transfer then remove the links to index.html.
Having a fairly strong PR6 site myself with 606,000 backlinks in Yahoo, I can relate a bit to what you're seeing, (it's what I'm trying to aviod). The signs you're seeing i.e. not returning as the number one result for your company name is similar to what seobook, seoguy and seoinc saw in the last update. Have you been pointing several high PR sitewides all to your home-page with the same anchor (not your company name, but any one keyword phrase) by any chance? Would be interested in knowing what exactly is happening.
No I've not done anything with sitewide links and while I understand the issue seobook and seoguy faced, I don't think this is the same issue. This is a site that hasn't really been optimized much until just recently, and very literally all of the inbound links the site has are 100% natural - since the company is a pretty large player in it's industry and the site has been up for a good number of years. Also, it DOES rank #1 for the company name, just its no longer the homepage ranking for it but an internal page. In fact, I can't get the homepage no matter what I search for (even exact phrase text from the homepage). Here's what I *THINK* has happened: - Homepage banned or removed for some reason. No longer returning in results, now has a 0 PR instead of previous 6 (for years). - Possibly set off a duplicate content filter b/c Google had both the www.domain.com and www.domain.com/index.html versions. - The www.domain.com/index.html version still has a PR 6, although I don't see it either in the search results. Any guesses?
Really beats me what could be the cause here. Both versions of the home page being considered dupe content seems highly unlikely... since then at least the /index.html page should appear in the results. Good luck on trying to figure out the cause and rectify the situation. Keep us posted, if something you're trying has any effect. Instances of dropped home pages returning back to the serps have been reported, so it might just be a temporary thing.
Not sure I understand what you are referring to here??? We don't have any redirects that we have set up... Update: As of this AM our homepage is now back in the SERPs and #1 for our company name. The PR of it is still 0 on the URL and 6 on the file name. A couple of days ago I repointed all internal links to the homepage to just the URL, so there are no longer any internal or inbound links I know of going to /index.html. Also, perhaps much more importantly, we removed a redirect script we had on the homepage which was 100% legit (too long to explain) but could have been executed as something other than redirect. I'm not sure if taking care of this fixed the problem or if today's SERPs are just bringing up old caches from before the issue happened - as I noticed some old caches for some other sites this AM.