Index page shows last on the results

[vipsvvvv]

Hi !

When i search google with site:www.example.com shows the homepage last, i will try to explain in few words what happend the last month:

My website first got indexed with the non-www version and everything was going perfect i had everyday traffic for my main keyword which was the domain name itself, i had about 112 pages index for the non-www version and then one day i search for site:www.example.com and i had about 14 pages index and one more that my domain name was showing for www.example.com/index.html so i got scared that something is not going well as my domain was index with 3 different ways:

1st example.com
2nd www.example.com
3rd www.example.com/index.html

then i search around for solutions and i got adviced that i need to choose a preferred domain version from google webmaster tools to aplu a 301 redirection so i choose the www.example.com version to be my default domain name and i apply this code in to my .htaccess:

Options +Indexes +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

### re-direct index.html to root / ###
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*\/index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]

### re-direct non-www to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

and the last change i made was to change all the internal links to my homepage from index.html to http://www.example.com/

Immediately after i made those changes my homepage disappear for all the keywords and when i search for www.example.com shows last in the results so that means i messed up everything big time.

172 indexed pages for site:example.com
and
59 indexed pages for site:www.example.com

What you think might be the problem here ?

1.is the code i apply for 301 redirection correct ?

2.is good thing i change the internal links to my homepage to http://www.example.com/

Someone in another post asked those questions:

Does the domain root resolve directly? That is, a request for www.example.com gets a 200 response and serves content, not redirecting for content?

Do you use a "custom" 404? If so, does it return a 404 in the http server header?

3.What is the 200 response and how can i check it works correct for me ?

Any help will be appreciated i dont know too many things about seo optimization and all this looks so comfusing

Thanks in advance

George

[edited by: tedster at 6:08 pm (utc) on April 8, 2008]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it cannot be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

How long since you made those changes? It can take weeks for Google to properly re-score the 301 redirects.

[vipsvvvv]

4 weeks ago made those changes

[tedster]

Well, you unfortunately chose a very busy time at Google. I'd just say be patient. New indexing of your 301 redirects is most likely stacked up somewhere in back end storage at Google and will show up soon. Of course, you can doublecheck your set-up technically just to be sure, but don't jump into any further action for at least a couple weeks.

What you say you did sounds correct. It's just that Google takes time to checkout redirects for trust purposes before recalculating everything.

[vipsvvvv]

Thank you very much for the reply, its very comforting to hear that it needs more time to recalculate the website.

I wish you all the best :-)

George