potentialgeek - 8:04 am on Nov 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

Just had a thought. What if Google deliberately excluded homepages (the first big indication that something was up) and rebuilt from there--seeing how homepages reflected the ACTUAL content of the site and not what the owner was pushing.

Google could run part of its algo against W-H (W minus H) where "W" is the website in full and "H" is only the home page. It could set up a score for the entire site and then scrutinize the homepage more carefully.

Imagine if the code was set up to test the home page and due to a programming error, the home page failed the test. The algo then gave the home page only a lower score. (The rest of the site, including inner pages were unaffected.)

It doesn't fit in with my other line of thought, but I just can't get my head around that early disappearence of homepages with inner pages still there, plus the simultaneous disappearance of sitelinks. My only thought is a forced relevency check (hence ignoring the 'noisy' or heavily SEO'd front page). Anyone else got a theory on the missing homepage phase of the 'event'?

I think it was a sitelinks code error. Google was trying to do something to upgrade its sitelinks code in order to pick: a) the sites which should get sitelinks, and, b) the links on those sites which should get chosen for the sitelinks.

Instead of the code being used only for sitelinks, it was applied into the code for the ranking algo. We've seen strange things happen before but I don't recall sitelinks being knocked out. The programming of sitelinks is obviously set on the foundation of the homepage.

Remember, too, that besides authority sites and sitelinks getting knocked, site names also got hit--the very same names that would bring up the sitelinks when searched as an exact search string at google.com.

I see more things pointing to a sitelinks coding error than anything else. Go back to my first statement and that's basically a big part of the sitelinks "bot" (or equivalent). Most of my sitelinks come from links on my home page. Google scrutinized it before allocating the eight sitelinks.

p/g