Index page missing from Goole for 4 months

Help! I think I accidentally sabotaged my index page with duplicate content

[lost in space]

The home page of my 5 year old PR5 website no longer shows title, description or cache and I think it might be my fault. I was using relative links in my href's instead of explicit path (FQDN) links. My site uses DNS aliases (third level domains) and due to the relative linking scheme google was scrambling the DNS aliases into the URL's when retrieving the static pages on the site. This caused my homepage to become improperly indexed over and over again with multiple third level domains. Example red.widgets.com green.widgets.com and my site www.widgets.com are ALL my index page. I figure that the content on my home page served up hundreds of times might have triggered a duplicate content penalty in Google and that is why the index page is no longer listed.

I fixed my href's to FQDN links and I have changed the content on my index page many times since it fell of Google. Gbot is in my logs several times a week, but nothing ever changes. It has been more than 4 months what should I do? [e-mail] was unable to assist me so I am praying that you pros might have some advice.

Would it help to move my index page via a 301 redirect to a different page? i.e. ww2.widgets.com or www.widgets.com/index2?

Dawna

[lost in space]

I really could use some advice on this matter. I used the Google URL remover to remove some of the duplicated pages, but after 3 days they are still listed. Google indexes my site and even adds my new pages, but I can't get my index page back in . I have worded so hard on this site I hate to just walk away from it. Has anything like this ever happened to any of you? Does anybody have some advice, encouragement, a duplicate content story with a happy ending, anything?

Thanks,

Dawna

[sailorjwd]

I had exact same problem (dup content of homepage) but from a different cause. I removed all copies of homepage with url removal tool - including the main one which was probably a mistake. If you used the url removal tool for a non-existent page then It may take as much as a week to be removed (from my experience).
I'm hoping I only have a 90 day wait and everything should be back to normal for me in May.

But IMHO you have to get rid of those dup pages from Google cache, but then again I know less than nothing.

Since loss of homepage I managed to tweak sub pages and use Adwords to bring traffic back to 90%

[lost in space]

Thank you sailorjwd. Would it be better to serve up a 404 or 410 on the pages I want removed?

Is your homepage still MIA?

Dawna

[lost in space]

Has anybody ever completely recovered from a penality? If so what steps did you take and how long was the wait?

Dawna