Home Page Not Appearing in Search Results

[paradoxos]

Recently (last month or so) my index page no longer appears in any search results. Other pages now appear in the results (even for our proprietary product name). How do I correct this or figure out what happened?

The non-index pages now perform poorly (second page) where the index page was on first page for competitive industry search terms.

[rowtc2]

Can be a filter. What "unnatural" things you did to the site?

[paradoxos]

The only thing I can think of is that we create websites and had footers on our client sites pointing to our home page. Other than that, I can't think of anything.

[Robert Charlton]

The only thing I can think of is that we create websites and had footers on our client sites pointing to our home page.

Are these your only inbound links, or do you have links from other sources too?

What about canonical issues? Have you looked at these?

Check the Duplicate Content section in the Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com] thread, which is pinned to the top of the Google Search forum home page. In particular, these threads might apply...

Why "www" & "no-www" Are Different [webmasterworld.com] - the canonical duplicate issue

Domain Root vs. index.html [webmasterworld.com] - yet another kind of duplicate

Did you make any changes recently to your home page? Note this recent discussion, eg, in which a robots meta tag was blocking the page...

First-page rankings disappear - many but not all keywords
[webmasterworld.com...]

[paradoxos]

I have links from other sources, but these are a good % of our total links.

Looking at your suggestions, I did find when I search for "domain.com" my site doesn't appear.

- Canonical isn't an issue.
- Domain Root vs. index.php isn't an issue.

[Robert Charlton]

I have links from other sources, but these are a good % of our total links.

This may be a part of your problem. What's the hosting situation with these client sites? On the same server as your site? And do they interlink with each other?

[outland88]

If you do a search for keywords or phrases where you previously expected to see your page what are you seeing related to your site? Other pages of your site? Somebody else’s site scrapers etc? Describe what you’re seeing if anything. From what you have described this doesn't sound like a large site?

Best quick advice: Return to a previous BU when everything was OK and leave it alone.

Make sure you don’t have any mislabeled copies of a file on a server. Many times I’ll rename the old copy with a date or by what it contained etc then forget and occasionally reload it.

[paradoxos]

Robert - Many are on our server. In the footer, we put 'Powered by PRODUCT NAME' on over 100 sites using our product. Since this happened, I have edited the footers so there are 6 variations with no more than 30 sites using one of these to point to our site.

Should I use nofollow?

Outland - If I search for keywords where I used to perform our home page used to be a top performer, now only random pages appear and they have dropped 10 or so places in the results.

[outland88]

If I search for keywords where I used to perform our home page used to be a top performer, now only random pages appear and they have dropped 10 or so places in the results.

Do a search for the keywords like ”widget yourdomain” without the .com . Does a box appear below your pages (if they are present) see more results from www. Click on that and see if your missing page appears there. Make sure also we aren't talking a 950 penalty either.

[paradoxos]

A box appear? I'm not sure what you are talking about. The page isn't really 'missing' it is there, it just isn't showing up on results as it used to.

[outland88]

Recently (last month or so) my index page no longer appears in any search results.

To me this is some algorithmically generated red flag (penalty). Hope you figure it out.