tedster - 12:52 am on Oct 4, 2007 (gmt 0)

When you see this, sometimes it's a temporary oddity as Google moves data around. If someone is seeing this right now for the first time, or even seeing the complete absence of the domain root on a site: query - especially when it's never been an issue before and traffic is still the same - then I'd just wait. Google is really shuffling data at the moment and in that kind of a period, stuff often happens that gets quickly straightened out.

But when you see a depressed domain root on Yahoo's site: operator as well, then I would definitely suspect a technical problem with your site. Here are some things I'd check on:

1. Does the domain root resolve directly? That is, a request for www.example.com gets a 200 response and serves content, not redirecting for content?

2. Have you addressed the common canonical issues and duplicate url issues? That means no-www redirects to the with-www version of every url and no links to the index.html version of your home pages url.

3. Do you use a "custom" 404? If so, does it return a 404 in the http server header?

4. Does every page (even the deep internal urls) have a "Home" link? If so,is it of this form? <a href="http://www.example.com/">?