Home Page is #2 ONLY in "omitted results" - otherwise gone

[Sam1234]

I have a site whose home page has come up in the #1 through #5 position for quite some time now for one of our keyword phrases. Another page on the site typically comes up on the third or fourth page of the results.

This morning, I noticed our home page was not coming up at all for this particular keyword phrase, although it was still coming up for other keyword searches. The other site page was still coming up on page three of the results. The home page does come up on other Google Data Centers (I found the IP addresses on this forum.)

I also noticed that if I repeat te serach with the ommitted results, our home page is listed in the number 2 position. Any idea on why this might be happening? How can I tell which IP address this is (if I go the command prompt on my computer and type ping www.google.com and type the given IP address in, my home page is listed as number 2)?

[tedster]

The omitted results are often those urls that look quite similar to other pages in Google's eye. By any chance has your page been copied elsewhere, particularly the title tag and/or description meta tag?

I focus on those two spots because there are some reports that right now, Google isn't looking at the whole page in every case, but just a few elements from the top of the document. Of course, a full copy of your page elsewhere could also create a problem.

Other ideas: are there alternate urls that might be resolving to your Home Page? Things like 302 redirects from other domains, sneaking framing by another domain, meta refreshes and so on?

I've also seen these symptoms when a "custom 404" page was actually a copy of the home page, but returning a 200 header rather than a 404. This made every non-resolving url spider as if it were a copy of the home page.

[Sam1234]

Tedster,

Thanks for the quick reply! I searched google and don't belive there are any copies of our home page (or even part of it). Also, we have 2 redirects to our home page but they are 301 redirects and we haven't had a problem with them before.

Any other ideas? Any chance the listing will be back tomorrow seeing as it's still listed in the #2 spot on many DCs (I know this is wishful thinking)