site:www.example.com always comes in second

[stevelibby]

I am not sure if i am posting this in the right category but i suppose it is related. I have noticed that my home page when searching site:www.domain.co.uk always comes in second, however i have noticed this applies to all deeper folders too, i know there have been postings of a similar nature, however i have not seen any like this!
Have you got any ideas?

[mrMister]

Is this in Google?

Usually this will be because people are linking to the inner page more often then they are the home page. This happens on sites with lots of useful articles where people may like an individual article and link to it directly. Does that seem likely for your site?

[stevelibby]

Yes this in G, Every page in my site has link back to the home page.

[1script]

I'm in the same boat.
I have one site that shows one other page before the homepage in SERPs for site:thesite.com
This page is of no huge importance to the site, not linked directly to from the outside and not even all that prominently linked to from the inside.
All I can think of is that this page links to a relevant PR6 external site which no other pages of my site link to. Maybe there is someting especially great about that site that makes a link to it it stand out in the algo? I would like to know that. If that's true, I'll link every one of my pages to it! (just kidding)
There is absolutely nothing else that separates this page from the rest of the pages on the site.

Additionally, someone suggested here that it's not good if your homepage is not #1 in SEPRs on site:yoursite.com so I'm contemplating even getting rid of the page. Anyone think that will help?

[stevelibby]

since this happened to me where the home page come in second my traffic has reduced by 70%, the page above my home page is always random, i do think its something to do with G's filter asn this is not the case in any other search engine.

[doois]

site:www.mysite.com homepage was first
SERP: 1st or 2nd for over a year.

then after BD update
site:www.mysite.com homepage was 18th, preceeded by supplementals and trashy old pages from the site.
SERP: Page 5.

then, for one lovely day....

site:www.mysite.com homepage was 1st, no supplementals.
SERP: 1st

It was as clear as daylight, a site where the homepage is not first on the site command is suffering from some kind of penatly. This could stem from canonical issues, duplication, large loss of inbound links...and God knows what else google has cooked up in the BD update.

Its worth mentioning we are still good enough for 1st spot on msn and yahoo.

[JimLahey]

Hi,
Yes, others are afflicted with the index page second thing. Many sites were hit with it on April.26/06 ...some even before that. I would expect you have virtually no rankings in Google better than the 3rd page of any keyword...including your uniquedomainname. Here are the symptoms

common symptons would be:
site:mysitename.com
site:www.mysitename.com
On the above two searches your home/index page is always listed 2nd below a random internal page.

mysitename
"www.mysitename.com"
"mysitename.com"
"mysitename"

On the above four searches your site will be buried and most likely appear on page 3 or 4 of the serps.

[1script]

@JimLahey:

Yes, others are afflicted with the index page second thing. Many sites were hit with it on April.26/06 ...some even before that. I would expect you have virtually no rankings in Google better than the 3rd page of any keyword...including your uniquedomainname.

No, I'm seeing a somewhat different picture. Although most of Google traffic is gone, it was all going to newer parts of the site (developed mostly in 2004-2005). Google traffic is still stable to old parts of the site - those 5-6 y.o. pages. In fact, the home page MOVED UP the SERPs on a trophy keyword after the #2 of site:my-site.com (hyphenated domain) happened or around that time.
The homepage shows up #1 on all site-related searches except site:my-site.com
The homepage and one other page of the site still show up as #3 and #4 SERPs on a 25,600,000 trophy keyword it's been on the first page for for the last 5 years.

Trouble is - one trophy keyword, even good one, is not enough for healthy traffic to the site. Vast majority of the traffic was from obscure keywords and phrases, and that is almost completely gone now. Google traffic overall is down 90%.

So, the entire second part of your list of symptoms does not apply to my site yet there is still a considerable issue with its Google index.

[icedowl]

I just tried both the "site:www.example.com" & "site:www.example.com/" search on my default DC, the home page is listed first in both versions. However, trying the "site:www.example.com/" on 64.233.167.104 the home page doesn't even show in the first 60 results. It does show first using the "site.www.example.com" search.

While I was using my default DC I tried searching for one of the pages using a 3-word string but I couldn't find it in a reasonable number of pages without quotes. I then tried to search using quotes ("keyword1 keyword2 keyword3") but a typo omitted the trailing quote mark("keyword1 keyword2 keyword3) and the page came up as the 6th result. I was surprised that it didn't seem to care about that ending quote mark. Maybe this has been going on from the beginning, but I have no way to know.

As an aside, I've managed to bring back supplemental results by turning on a section of this site. I've since turned that section off so hopefully those results will disappear soon. The site is using the Joomla CMS.

[stevelibby]

Have you tried site:www.domain.co.uk/folder/
do you have the same results agin that the home page of that directory is not in first place?

[ScottD]

I would like to know if any of those suffering this problem have a hyphenated site name ie. www.my-example.com (as if I really needed to explian that...)

Its just that we do and this seems to cause a problem with the site: search tool (there's another thread about this problem in this forum), but more than we are suffering big time with this issue and the site is totally lost in the SERPs.

We also do very well in Y and MSN by the way - for all the good that does.

[stevelibby]

i dont have a - in my domain.

[Silent_Bob]

My site was sufferring from this problem since 26th April, but it just bounced back yesterday. I'm not sure if its something that just fixes itself, but it may be worth checking my thread on it to see what I did which may have solved the issue for me at least.

[stevelibby]

where is your thread silent_bob

[Silent_Bob]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[1script]

@ stevelibby:

Have you tried site:www.domain.co.uk/folder/
do you have the same results agin that the home page of that directory is not in first place?

Just did additional testing using your criteria. Well, except my site is not in UK, of course ;-)

I've been pretty amazed to see that NONE of my internal directories' index pages show up as #1 on the search that you have suggested. In many instances I do have links directly to individual pages which might have explained it, but in many other instances I only link to the index of the directory ( like /directory/, not like /directory/index.html ), and it still shows up as #2 at best and mostly #5-6.

Are we onto something here? I hope we are because the lack of reasonable explanation for this really pisses me off. Oh, by the way, this site has a hyphen in the domain name. Let me know if you get similar observations and if some data of value can be collected here.

[stevelibby]

One day my deeper folders show home page in 2nd and on others 1st. However i have noticed that on the days home page is in 1st place keyword ranking does return higher.
I have also noticed that G does not show back links on my page that are deeper than the home page.

1script try this...type link:http://www.domain.co.uk do you find your domain in the links?
If anyone else has the same issue with home page let me know your url.

[mypattaya]

I believe that if the homepage is not on top for site command, then your site is stuck in some sort of filter, perhaps sandbox.

Wait a while and your homepage will be on top, I've experience it with my own site. My homepage keeps moving up since the site got indexed. Once its up doesn't mean you'll be out of the sandbox, but it is definitely the sign that your site will do better in SERP.

[1script]

1script try this...type link:http://www.domain.co.uk do you find your domain in the links?

Yes, I do. But once again, they start with #2 and then go on and off mixed in with other links from other sites to me.
My problem is #1 that shows up on link:http://www.my-domain.com. It's some sort of an in-voluntary scraped-off-Yahoo listing in some stupid directory in Malaysia ( [vlib.mmu.edu.my...] if you're interested) that has a counter script that 302 redirects to my homepage! I have authority links from real industry-related sites but they are all knocked down to page 4 past this stupid directory link, my own links and links from my other sites (site-wides).

Anyone knows what can be done about that 302 redirection problem considering contacting the owner of the directory did not work?

[1script]

I believe that if the homepage is not on top for site command, then your site is stuck in some sort of filter, perhaps sandbox.

I certainly hope it's not sandbox 'cause this is an 8 years old site.
Additionally to the other troubles I described above there is huge disparity between the number of links to the site as reported by Google and Yahoo:
Google: 108
Yahoo: 103,000
Granted, Google never showed the real number, but 1000 times difference?!

[arubicus]

" certainly hope it's not sandbox 'cause this is an 8 years old site.
Additionally to the other troubles I described above there is huge disparity between the number of links to the site as reported by Google and Yahoo:
Google: 108
Yahoo: 103,000
Granted, Google never showed the real number, but 1000 times difference?! "

We have had this trouble a while back. It finally corrected and things started to stick and rank better. We even rank for our unique company name. The link thing has got me just the same. Google does not show any incoming links to sub pages just the home page. The home page only shows about 10 out of a few thousands that yahoo reports. The 10 it DOES show are plain junk.

In a way it seems like a re-sandbox effect.

[stevelibby]

i have also come accross another interesting thing, i own www.domain.co.uk but i also own domain-dealers.co.uk which i bought in 2004, when i search domain i now get around 600 links wheras i used to get 12-13000, now when i do domain-dealers i get 9000 and that is where they have gone and domain is included in the results.
What do i do now? Must be carefull but i think this is why my site has gone wrong.

[Porter5Forces]

My site has this problem too where the home page always comes 2nd for a site: command. If it is a sandbox problem, I wonder how long is the duration.

[Kangol]

Same here.
I am second and I also have a canonical problem only for the homepage. Google messed up my site so bad it does not even ranks for its name. I would really love to hear someone from Google giving an explication and solution for this problem.

[arubicus]

" My site has this problem too where the home page always comes 2nd for a site: command. If it is a sandbox problem, I wonder how long is the duration. "

You know at the beginning of last year we seen many of the SAME exact problems webmasters are seeing recently. Just seems more wide-spread now.

The thing is I have don't know how to fix any of it. The home page coming second was fixed a few months back and things are starting to look up. I don't know what fixed it or why it was coming second but ever since it returned to normal the site started to look and act a bit more "normal."

Even though the home page thing is corrected we are still not completely fixed. Better but not fixed. It acts like we are re-sandboxed. Links are not at normal levels. Internal pages are not showing backlinks. Our supplemental problems seem do be correcting...

I would take a close look for any problem areas on your site(s) and attempt a reinclusion request just to bring these problems in front of them and hope to see something fixed. That is about all I can say.