caveman - 11:53 pm on Feb 29, 2004 (gmt 0)

Tim, since you're hanging around - between the meetings on the conference circuit - I'll throw this out and see if you (or anyone) can shed light...especially since from the posts in here, I'm aware of a number of Webmasters with similar if not identical concerns...

1)Slurp-si visits your robots.txt and doesn’t index your pages 2)You submit via Paid Inclusion and your URLs appear via a URL query but are deeply buried for a keyword query 3)You suddenly lose all your traffic overnight

ALL the pages from that site are doing fine/as expected, except this homepage. The site gets spidered, etc. The PFI'd pages do better than the non-PFI'd pages. The homepage is the only page that is nowhere to be found in the SERP's.

One might guess that this particular homepage is just designed badly, but we have other pages and sites PFI'd, and in all cases the homepages are doing fine.

This particular problem page was originally titled "home.htm" with a mod rewrite involved (don't ask). As soon as I discoverd it, I had it changed to "index.htm." Unfortunately that was just a day or so after we PFI'd about half the pages in the site, including this one...which was PFI'd as "home.htm". We did a 301 redirect and dropped the "home.htm" page.

No other page on the site is penalized, and no other page for any of our sites is penalized. This page is not different in approach or structure. It seems that it almost surely has to do with the redirect from "home.htm" to index.htm, or some other tech issue.

If I had had some others penalized, or just saw a bad ranking, or saw that other pages in the site were also not coming up, I might think there was a penalty issue of some sort, or that INK just didn't like the pages...they do fine in Y! also BTW. However, since all other pages are doing fine, I can't see any sort of penalty being a valid explanation...

Any thoughts on how I and others in a similar boat might get some help?