Link exchange removed - now homepage not indexed

[ervin81]

Hi,

I used to have about 30 link exchange on the homepage. I've added this for 2 years already. Now, I've recently removed link exchange from the homepage and have added nofollow tag to all of the banner advertising.

This is the only change that I've made so far. Now my homepage is not even in the index when I do a site search. However, my index.asp is ranking but not the default URL.

Ranking has dropped significantly where the default URL page used to rank. The index.asp is ranking instead but deep down in the SERPs.

I've check the google webmaster tool and have found nothing wrong.

What should I do to fix this?

[Jane_Doe]

If you have a backup copy before the recent changes you might want to restore your site to the old version and see if that helps.

[ervin81]

that's a good idea but I think I should wait a few weeks before I do that. I think it is possible that all of sudden I've loads of incoming link to the homepage and no outbound links at all.

Would that be the cause of the problem?

[Hissingsid]

I have some carefully chosen outbound links, both in terms of anchor text and what I'm linking to, from my home page. This seemed to be important after the Florida update.

Works for me.

Cheers

Sid

[bwnbwn]

This is the only change that I've made so far. Now my homepage is not even in the index when I do a site search. However, my index.asp is ranking but not the default URL.

This tells me you have both 2 home pages indexed and they are considered duplicate content.

Have you changed the site from one language to another at some point in time? have you done a site command to see how many pages you have indexed?

I doubt the links change and adding no follows did this to your site it is the above duplicate pages that wacked ya.

Figure out how this (duplicate home pages) happened and 301 the old pages to the ones you want displayed.

[ecmedia]

From time to time a page may drop from the main index for no apparent reason (I assume it is a glitch). The best thing to do is to wait and do nothing. In most cases it will come right back. Adding/deleting links has nothing to do with it.

[CainIV]

"However, my index.asp is ranking but not the default URL."

That might be the issue itself. Is there two ways to access content at your root - the absolute domain - [yourdomain.com...] as well as [yourdomain.com...]

If so, that might be the issue, you will need to ensure that only one url is able to be accessed per page, including the homepage.

In terms of the homepage links, did you remove them slowly, or slam em out all at once :)

[ervin81]

CainIV

Yes, the homepage can be access through both www.yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com/index.asp

How do I avoid duplication? What to do?

Yes, I've removed the homepage links all at once.

[ervin81]

I've tried doing a site search for 2 of my sites that I did the same thing (Removed link exchange)

site:myfirstsite.com/index.asp - A page shows up.
site:mysecondsite.com/index.asp - No page shows up. This site is fine.

I'm pretty sure now that the problem is because I have 2 ways to access the content at the root, absolute domain and /index.asp.

How do I avoid this?

[ervin81]

Now I've tried adding this code to my index.asp page.

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Dim Page
if Request.ServerVariables("SCRIPT_NAME")= "/index.asp" then
Page="/"
Else
page=Request.ServerVariables("SCRIPT_NAME")
end if

If InStr(Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME"),"www") = 0 Then
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.mydomain.com" & Page
End if
%>

Is this the right thing to do?

[ervin81]

I've tried doing a 301 redirect but it turned out to be an endless loop.

So I figure I should change my robots.txt file to

User-Agent: *
Allow: /

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /index.asp
Allow: /

Lets see if this help. Will wait a week to see the result.