pr0 penalty to my index page and sitemap but nowhere else

pr0 penalty

[gruffy]

I'm guessing this situation is just fall-out from big daddy but I do want to make sure before I spend a few days rebuilding my site to appease googlebot.

I've managed to stay in the 1st, second or 3rd position for my main search term for nearly 5 years up until feb 2006. Not a popular keyword but very valuable to me anyway.

The site was established in 2001. Well optimized and I haven't made any structural changes in nearly 4 years. Its only about 10 static pages. Last year I added a vbulletin forum and its directory is excluded with robots.txt. There were no ranking changes with the addition nearly 12 months ago.

Originally with the big daddy update I dropped to around page 4. Just dropped to page 6 recently so I figured I better take a look around on my site.

I noticed my index.html page has a pr0...but my domain name is pr4 and all of the sub-pages off my main menu are pr3. Also noticed my sitemap was pr0 which was kind of odd.

So I took down the sitemap recently... not a permanent move but just to see if G really didn't like it for some reason. No change since the site has been recrawled.

Any ideas? My guess is duplicate content related.

[Vadim]

I noticed my index.html page has a pr0...but my domain name is pr4

You seems has the canonical problem. Index.html should be redirected with 301 to your domain.

Google 301, .htaccess, canonical problem and search WW.

Vadim

[gruffy]

Thanks vadim... searched around and uploaded a new .htaccess file as prescribed in the searches.

Found a few pages in supplemental, and some other oddities like "mysite.com/index.html/index.html" which for some reason works on my webserver.