Homepage "unindexed" in google

Problem with 301 redirects

[shady]

Recently google removed the cache for the homepage of a long standing website with good rankings.

This followed me renaming the 15,000 webpages and using 301 redirects to point to the new pages (perhaps the old expression "if it works don't fix it" may be mentioned here!).

The index page, however has always been there and I see no reason for it to be "dumped".

Is it possible that google has seen all these 301's and decided it would be better to completely flush the site and start again or does it sound like I have permanent problems here?

This site is about as White Hat as possible!

Any help appreciated!

[shady]

Anyone?

[RobinK]

We had our homepage do that recently too. We also had a lot of 301's on site. We got rid of the 301's and just the other day our homepage came back. It took over 2 months though.

[RobinK]

Just to add, our site had been on line for over 4 years, white hat, no problems until then.

[Ledfish]

Had a similiar problem with our homepage being dumped, however we didn't have any 301 redirects. Our internal pages continued to rank well.

Unfortunately, it has taken the Gods over 6 months to bring our homepage back in and we still don't have any idea why it got dumped.

Now, our internal pages seem to have taken a dive. Some have gotten dumped altogether while others have dropped 50-100 positions.

And of course, everything on our site is white hat only.

Anybody able to guess at what they problem is here?

[Rodney]

this may seem like a newbie question, but what is a 301 redirect?

[Reid]

but what is a 301 redirect

when a user-agent requests a page from your server, the server returns a code

200 - page found
301 - page moved permanently
302 - page moved temporarily
304 - page cached (by user-agent) is current
404 - page not found

these are the more common ones but there are others
301 redirect is accomplished by .htaccess or evivalent.
basicaly you are telling the server - if anyone requests widgets.html then send them to blue-widgets.html and issue code 301 (this page has been moved permanently)

user-agent requests widgets.html
server responds 301 (moved permanently) to blue-widgets.html
then 200 (page found) blue-widgets.html

301 should cause googlebot to change the listing (from widgets to blue-widgets) this is also how you move a domain.

[Reid]

This followed me renaming the 15,000 webpages

Maybe google see's this as 15000 new pages (and 15000 old pages gone). Probably starting over but it may recover fairly quickly (compared to a brand new site)- more like a domain move which could take 2-3 months.

The thing I would watch for is that google acually drops the pages that no longer exist.
If it has cache (which it likes to hang on to) and then caches the new pages you could run into a serious duplicate content issue. This may explain why homepage dropped, it should recover once google figures it out.

Look at site:mysite in google and make sure the transition is happening properly (not duplicating) and how far it has gone. This should give you an idea of where your at.

[shady]

Look at site:mysite in google and make sure the transition is happening properly (not duplicating) and how far it has gone. This should give you an idea of where your at.

Yeah, its done a fantastic job of removing the pages... Out of the first 1000 pages about 996 are listed as just the URL.

I am just crossing my fingers each day that the homepage comes back into cache!

I'll keep you informed if and when anything happens!

[MikeNoLastName]

Ours just did this today too, think it might have something to do with the current update going on. we dropped from 2 to 96 overnight. It was 301'd about 6 months- yr ago and was doing fine. Maybe G is finally trying to fix the redirect hijacking issue and 301's are temporarily getting caught in the crossfire. Something like this happened during the last update too, hopefully they'll be straightend out in a few days like last time.

[Reid]

It was 301'd about 6 months- yr ago and was doing fine. Maybe G is finally trying to fix the redirect hijacking issue and 301's are temporarily getting caught in the crossfire.

If the site has been moved and google has the new url's listed then this should have no effect at all.