Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
When I enter "site:example.com", I can see my index page on the top, but when I enter "site:www.example.com", I cann't see it at all!
It's really strange, can anybody tell me the reason please?
[edited by: tedster at 4:36 pm (utc) on Jan. 9, 2010]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]
I have seen instances of this happening to an index page I havent changed though, but they always came back into the serps. The related issue is that they were all sites that were new to the serps.
The above 2 examples was of the page going missing altogether, regardless of www or not. But...
Not sure if you will have to redirect site.com to www.site.com to get the neccessary changes in the serps as your page without the www prefix may have been the first url to be indexed (in this case seeing it as dupe content?). If your site is old and this is the first instance I would sweat it out and let Google roll caffeine into full swing before making any decisions or changes.
I thought this s happening to me only.
I noticed a slight drop in my traffic from Google, after investigating, i noticed that my home page disappeared from search using parameter site:example.com. (That happened 20 hours before now).
Now im searching and i found my home page back to index (few minutes ago)/
Important Notes:
1- I change nothing in the home page.
2- Current indexed version is (30 Dec) , but im sure i saw the last indexed version was 5 Jan before this happened! so looks like an older
index is back!
I wish other webmasters can check and see if any lost home page from index.
Thanks
When Google builds new data-sets, they mash together data from different places - different servers and IP addresses in their infrastructure. These lists can be just the domain root itself, just the home page. These home page lists are put together for various purposes, most especially a list of trusted websites, something whitenight has called the "ghost dataset".
Unfortunately, they sometimes get an incomplete or corrupted import of the data that they hope to fold in to the final data-set. When that happens, home pages go missing for a short period.
A friend of mine recently had found that his web programmer uploaded a dev version of the website from the subdomain to live, on a Friday night. Unfortunately, he was in a hurry to get a beer, and didn't take 5 minutes to check. If he had of, he would have noticed that he copied the noindex nofollow tag directly over from the subdomain to live :(
Yes i checked robots and htaccess files , all fine.
Now even its still early morning here, i see some cure indicators, i think traffic is getting back to normal.
So to readers may see this topic, it took 24-36 hours to get back to normal.
So to readers may see this topic, it took 24-36 hours to get back to normal.
alahamdan - Thanks for reporting that, as this bug has been arousing a lot of concern.
I have another thing i would like to share.
When i first discovered the problem, i noticed all my main -related to home page keywords disappeared. i was shocked and afraid.(i was disabling search depending on user experience).
After few minutes, i cleared browser cash, re-disabled search depending on user experience (forgot exact name). and then started to see my keywords back in SERP.
So i feel the drop in traffic was some way related to mistaken cookie , dont know if it was only me, but i think it worth mentioning.
Checking my statistics logs again now, i can assure yes, for my website things back to normal.
Regards.
