Duplicate Title and Description

is this why my homepage is MIA when searching for domain name?

[andrewshim]

May 02, traffic from Google stopped. When I searched for my domain name (without www. and .com) I couldn't find it. However, I did find two pages with the same title and description as my homepage.

One page, I could delete because it was a test copy of my homepage. I don't know why Google crawled it because there were no inbound links pointing to it. In any case, I also requested that the URL be removed.

The other page is an RSS feed in XML format. Since I could not delete this file, I changed the title and description to one that was different from my homepage.

A week later, my site was back to its old rank and my homepage appeared as #1 when I search for my domain name.

4 days later, I'm missing again and fallen down the rankings again (300+). This time, I notice that the XML file is still there with the old title and description.

Questions :

Could the duplicate titles and descriptions be the cause of my homepage going MIA?

Does Google revert back to old results sets every now and then and if yes, how long do I have to wait before the results sets reflect my corrections?

[piatkow]

Other people have reported this effect in the past. You fix a problem, it appears sorted, drops back to the old version then bounces back again. There may be a couple more bounces until the revised serps settle down.

[andrewshim]

That is IF I fixed the CORRECT problem.

[g1smd]

It may only be a part of the problem, but fix it as best as you can anyway.

Next up, check that each "page" of your site only has one URL that can access it.

[Robert Charlton]

One page, I could delete because it was a test copy of my homepage. I don't know why Google crawled it because there were no inbound links pointing to it. In any case, I also requested that the URL be removed.

andrew - Since you removed the page, this is now moot... but, fyi, from the Googlebot page on "Google Information for Webmasters" regarding unpublished urls...

[google.com...]

Why is Googlebot downloading information from our "secret" web server?

It's almost impossible to keep a web server secret by not publishing any links to it. As soon as someone follows a link from your "secret" server to another web server, your "secret" URL may appear in the referrer tag and can be stored and published by the other web server in its referrer log. So, if there's a link to your "secret" web server or page on the web anywhere, it's likely that Googlebot and other web crawlers will find it.