Index page missing.

missing index page in Google serps

[chrisuk]

I know there has just been a pr update and things may still be settling but the following has just happened to my content site. The site is about 3 years old and was pr 6 on the index page, the index page is now a 4 after the latest update. The site is clean, no ads and no dodgy SEO, all content is sticky and original, on paper just the kind of site that Google should like.

The index page has completely gone from Google but all of the sub pages are still in the main index, some 16,500 pages and most of these have kept their original pr (from last week) The sub pages are mainly pr 5 and are now higher in pr than the index page.

Yesterday the index page was in google on page one and was displaying the missing title and desc symptom, today it is gone, just the index page. Traffic levels to internal pages is still constant.

Is this typical of a glitch that will iron itself out if I leave it and do nothing or is it a sign of falling out of favour? There are no obvious signs of any penalty otherwise.

Views please?

[tedster]

The PR update is just a toolbar update -- it's for entertainment purposes and not directly related to the ranking of pages.

The index page has completely gone from Google

Google is rolling out a new infrastructure right now, and things are not stable to say the least -- you may find that the index reappears in the near future. When you say it's gone, do you mean from the site: operator? Or do you mean you see no Google search traffic to the homepage in your logs, but you used to?

[chrisuk]

The index page is not in google, can't be found, all other pages are fine and getting normal levels of referals, no obvious problems with them or their pr.

[chrisuk]

Any ideas, penalty or glitch here?

Thanks

[Steph_R]

Check to see if you have a lot of supplemental results in G. with the site:www.yourdomain.com search. If you do, then this could be a penalty.

[Dayo_UK]

chrisuk

Yes, this has been a bug on Google for about a year or so.

Even Matt Cutts Blog has had his index page disappear and reappear.

Hopefully Big Daddy will solve this problem.

Does your index page appear on this dc?:-

[64.233.179.104...]

[MrRoy]

I have also encountered the similiar problem like ChristUK. All my internal index pages got disappeared from Google and also its showing that the url's are not at all listed in Google. Even the Cached Page is not showing. But the strange thing that we noticed is that the sub sectional pages of the internal pages (whose index page got disappeared) still coming in SERP and is indexed too.
M in complete disarray.

I have checked in different Datacenters specially the Big Daddy as well as Little Daddy (http://64.233.179.104/ ).
I dint find my website in those datacenters.

I havent used any spammy techniques for which my website get penalize

Kindly help with your valuable inputs

[chrisuk]

No there are no supp results, all internals are rocking with normal pr and traffic. Internals are pr5 index page was pr6 then went to 4 at last shuffle and then vanished from G.

So all my other 25kish pages are working normally in google, in fact traffic is up but the index page has gone completely on every dc.

The only other thing that might be relevant is that shortly before the page vanished the index page listing started to display the index page using just the url, no title or desc. Then a few days later it just vanished.

Very weird.

[Steph_R]

Make sure you do not have two copies of the same page indexed in google.

For example, www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com

If you do, you might want to consider setting up a 301 redirect so you don't get hit with duplicate content penalties.

[tedster]

Also, Google has been known to penalize the home page but not the rest of the domain. Make sure your inbound links to the home page are all legit (I use Yahoo Site Explorer [siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com] to check).

With all the similar reports I've heard recently, I think this is much more likely a problem with the new Google infrastructure. But it's good to cover all the bases -- things that you can do something about if you find a problem. We can't fix Big Daddy.