Very strange symptoms with rankings, allinanchor: and missing home page

[mfishy]

I don't typically post topics about Google "glitches" or when really odd things happen because I know there is so much going on with so many sites BUT I am seeing something very unusual.

A site that I work with is still scoring on most of the major keywords. This is a 7 year old, PR5 site. However, when I search for a few terms, they are simply gone (far less competitive keywords too). This is not the -950 penalty because I am not in the top 1000.

What makes this much stranger is, despite scoring for the biggest terms my pages do not show up in the allinanchor query (should be top 3) and when I do a site search the homepage is url only (tons of other pages are fine)

I am scoring for very competitive stuff but appear to have dropped for a decent amount of "lesser" terms and the home page does not appear when i do a site:domain.com search, even tough the home page is #1 for most terms.

I should mention that there is a 301 from home page to homepage.com/whatever but this has been there for 7 years without issue so I am not sure if this is relevant.

Anyone else go missing for select terms (not the -950) and/or see themselves scoring well, but not showing up when doing a site search or simply searching for the domain?

[tedster]

We have seen reports here about the home page gone missing on site: queries but still ranking on keyword queries. The tie-in with allinanchor: queries is interesting. I can't say I do all that much with either inanchor: or allinanchor: because the results often seem buggy in the areas where I work.

What is uncommon in your case is that you lost rankings on the minor words and retained them on the most important ones. That is definitely very strange.

[edited by: tedster at 4:22 am (utc) on July 30, 2008]

[mfishy]

I wouldn't care so much since most rankings are retained to tis point BUT one gets the feeling that it is a bad sign of things to come anytime Google does not even return the home page of your domain when you search for it. :)

More than ever I get the feeling that Google has almost entirely lost their ability to make changes without really screwing things up for a huge percentage of sites.

[confuscius]

As each week passes then less and less seems certain with good old Google! A new site I set up a couple of weeks ago now has some pages indexed - ALL external links point at the homepage, homepage URL submitted, WMT set up, etc, etc - BUT the pages indexed are two levels deep with no homepage and no interim category pages so it seems to me that if Google is missing the top levels of the site then in Google's eyes the site has no structure and is a site of disparate disconnected pages when in reality it is a 'properly' constructed site. It will be interesting to see how long it is before Google catches up with its spidering as to get to the lower level pages it must have to had gone through the top level link structure. Welcome to the next phase of the Google lottery!

[idolw]

you guys 100% sure there are no technical problems with the sites? Header error sent to googlebot, etc? This is what happened to my home page once. Been looking for reasons for quite a while before found out.

Here in Poland I read some reports of sites getting filtered during the last TB PR update. Usually sites were filtered for X out of Y targeted phrases.

[mfishy]

I am back for everything that was missing.

I do think it is still quite important to understand that Google is unintentionally screwing things up. It may be time, if you have not already, to think about developing or buying that 2nd site if you are someone that works with one only one major site.

[BroadProspect]

check if the bot visits you, it usually happens when the bot stops visiting the site for over 2 week for a pr 5 site
/BP