Suspicious "Site:" Query - home page is missing

[AZain]

Dear All.

Does any body notice any suspicious behavior of Google "Site:" query in past couple of days. As it is not showing my website home page. Any type of penalization. I found about 3 ~ 4 websites like this. Any one who have same situation.

Well on searching my domain name w/o site: its working fine.

If any please update here.

[suratmedia]

Check for internal duplication across pages; if got nothing then check for duplicates titles,description suggested by GWT as "HTML Suggestion".

In 99% case "canonization issue" vanish homepage from site: query.

[tedster]

A number of other members have mentioned seeing this in recent days - and it may not have anything to do with a true problem on your site - especially because your home page comes up for a simple domain name query.

In fact, in a funny kind of way, this is sometimes a sign of something good - as long as it clears up. One of the things Google apparently does is maintain various lists of domain names for certain purposes. One of the main reasons is maintaining a list of domain names with a high trust or brand value.

When G is moving lots of data around on their back end, sometimes these dedicated lists don't get completely imported into the "final" big list and then the domain name goes missing from the site" operator results. This happened about a year and a half ago in a big way - and several very big name domains saw a temporarily missing home page.

While it is always good to have an eye on possible canonicalization problems [webmasterworld.com] (suratmedia's advice is excellent), you may well have nothing to fix.

[g1smd]

I've seen many sites over the years where the root URL wasn't listed first in a site: search. In the past that has always pointed to an internal linking and/or canonicalisation problem. I don't recall seeing any site where this was not the case, and I am not seeing any right now (though I have only a small sample to work with).

[blend27]

I just went thru this issue with one of the sites I took over to manage, for my friend.

Internal linking was the Issue, Duplicate content was served via 4 different URIs.

New Site, 8 month old, somehow the DARN original CMS Developer desided that is was OK to do so.

Removed the links to Dupe Content, redirected Via 301 none homepage links back to the homepage, BOOM, 2 weeks back in BIZ!

[AZain]

I am agree with you guys it might be a part of duplication penalty. But it seems only on shopping sites. Please have a look on Ebay, Zappos, lightinthebox with "site:" query in google. there home page is not showing without www and with www ebay has only 3 pages to show.

[Gorgwatcher]

Even Google own home page is not showing for site:www.google.com :)

[tedster]

Good observation. It's not showing without the "www" either.