Homepage disappeared from Google, Yahoo and MSN but sub pages are fine

[automan1]

Hello,

My website has disappeared from Google, Yahoo and MSN but the sub pages can all be found.

I have copied and pasted a sentence from the home page into google but nothing comes up.

I recently contracted an seo company to carry out some optimization work and the website had been climbing the se's nicely and new content was being added to improve page rank etc. I know the title tag was changed from the company name to www. company name .com so perhaps this is why it has disappeared. I really am at a loss.

The website disappeared on Thursday 20th Nov and has not reappeared since.

If anyone could help me shed some light on this I would appreciate it.

Nick

[tedster]

Hello automan1, and welcome to the forums.

This is not just a Google issue if all three major search engines have dropped your home page. I'd suspect some kind of spidering problem with your server - or you may have even been hacked.

I'd suggest installing two Firefox add-ons: Live HTTP Headers and User Agent Switcher. Try accessing your home page in Firefox while switching your user agent to one or another search engine spider. Discover how your server responds.

[automan1]

Thanks for such a quick response Tedster.

I have forwarded your response to the seo company dealing with my website and see if this helps them.

They have yet to provide a reason as to why the homepage has disappeared other than "this sometimes happens when google respiders, it should be back in a few months".

I don't have a few months though!

Do you think there is a chance the website has been banned due to some black hat tricks?

[tedster]

Sure there's a chance - but they would have to be very "ham-fisted" spam tricks for all 3 search engines to penalize the home page at the same time. And if all the search engines still show internal urls, then a penalty weems unlikely since they all react in different ways to attempts at spam.

[Robert Charlton]

Just worked on a site where the developer had left in a robots meta tag that blocked the page from indexing...

<meta name="robots" content="none">

It's worth a check. I've seen it happen more than once.

[tez899]

I had three new blogs (not interlinked) have their index temporarily removed from G's index. One's just coming back, I believe it was a bug but I don't know about Y & MSN. Check if your headers are returning a 200.

Search on the forum, there are quite a lot of similar threads.