301 problems / no home page on site: search

[MyProfilePimp]

45 days ago we changed the whole URL structure of uor site. We 301 all old pages to their new Pages with New URL. (over 20,000) Some 14k have been re indexed and sending the usual Trafic to our site. The Problem is Our home page, which holds Awesome #1 and top 10 rankings for Key terms in our niche, is no where to be found. If you do a Site Search no home page if you do a direct search for the URL no problem.

Most over seas google sites have us with our normal rankings..

Confused on when and how long this lasts.

ROB

[tedster]

Hello ROB, and welcome to the forums.

You've added yet another "missing home page" report - we've been hearing a lot of that recently. I don't know that there is any answer for how long it takes to get fixed, because it's not a standard situation. With regards to the country-specific Google's, I've long assumed that changes start on google.com and then roll out to other ccTLDs.

The odd thing here is that the domain root would be the one page that did NOT get a new url. Is that correct?

[MyProfilePimp]

Yes this is correct...

We did change the layout of the home page and all our New Urls are being indexed fine but our home page (which had great rankings) is no longer showing in a site search.

Its like we got some kind of homepage penalty.

Very strange...

I could understand if the inner pages had a hard time but penalizing the root seems strange...

Rob

[vcff10]

Any One with Any Ideas...

[tedster]

Many past instances of this ONLY affected the site: operator results. When you searched by putting the domain name "example.com" directly into the Google search box, the home page was still returned as the first result, and traffic was not affected. If this is your situation, then it's just another bug in Google's special operator and not a penalty of any kind.

[vcff10]

No traffic was affected horribly

lost all home page rankings to the tune of tens of thousands a day

I personally watched it fall out of every datacenter about 36 hours after the mass 301....

the home page title was changed and cached wrong then changed back during this time...

It seems as a penalty of some sort...

[tedster]

OK - this does sound like a real problem. My own approach when a client wants to change massive urls has been to do a study and 301 only the key old urls (heavy search traffic or backlinks). Then we let almost all the others go 404 and Google can find the new urls by spidering the new links on the site. That has worked well, so far. Your report confirms me in this approach.

I'm still not sure this is a "true" penalty - as in "you are breaking our guidelines". It may well be the temporary result of Google needing to check through so many 301s and new urls with their "trust" algorithms, whatever they are. I have seen mass 301 troubles last for several months, and even then, only recover slowly.

I assume you have already done this, but if not it would be really good to double check all the redirect and rewriting code. Make sure your links to Home are all consistent, and so on.

If you have Webmaster Tools, you may also pick up a clue there - and GWT also gives you an authenticated communication channel to Google. If you don't have GWT, then signing up and validating yourself as the one responsible for the site might help. You don't have to use any further tools. Just by signing up you get reports from Google of data they already have anyway - and now you see it too.

[vcff10]

This is why this problem is so perplexing...

Google shows no problems with not being able to index our site.

They have just left our homepage out of the results for any KW terms...

If you do a site search for our domain 15,200 of our pages come up but no homepage.

Now if search for our "domain.com" then it shows fine and gets cached everyday...

We have 60k back links 56k of them to the home page....

Should I contact Google? Im at a loss Ive been doing this a long time and have never had this happen before....

Rob

[vcff10]

Looking over the Webmaster tools data everything is A OK

[vcff10]

Also to answer your last message YES if you do a site.com Search everything is ok...

but if you do a site:www.mydomain.com then no home page

Thanks