Strange - most pages rank except for our home page

[davidh6781]

Strange thing has happened recently, doing to usual check with regards the keywords and the serps and for our main keyword our domain.com/index.htm has gone from google.

all our other pages are still listed and for the relavent keywords its just our home page that has gone,

we have checked webmaster tools for any notes, errors etc, nothing. the page and site is still there working fine.

can any one shed some light on why just one page would go and why would it be the bread winner page.

[edited by: tedster at 10:41 pm (utc) on Oct 16, 2010]
[edit reason] moved around but not edited - admin difficulties [/edit]

[tedster]

This is a strange little bug that sometimes happens when Google is preparing for a big data push - and they often have a big change right before the holiday shopping system.

We've discussed the apparent back end problem a number of times in past years, but it does get less than interesting when all you want is your home page back in the rankings.

If this is what I think it is, and it's only been a few days - plus your website is traditionally strong and very "white hat" - then consider it a nasty Google bug, but one that will probably be straightened out on its own, and very soon.

If the problem is more than, say, 7-10 days old, then you may have a different issue going.

[g1smd]

I hope your home page is not "example.com/index.htm".

It should be "example.com/" without any filename reference.

Make sure you link to "/" and not to "/index.htm" from all pages within your own site.

Check out both "site:example.com -inurl:www" and "site:www.example.com" in Google. One of those searches should return ZERO results.

[davidh6781]

Ok thank you letshope it stays, thing is we do the seo and sem by the White hat book, needless to say some competitors do not and are still listed. Gets onyour wick a little.

Please be assured it's not example.com/index.htm I just put that to emphasise the homepage.

[kellyman]

Simiar thing happend to my site, all homepage keywords all dropped (not gone)all inner pages are fine and ranking well and climbing but homepage keywords are position 32 from 5 and have not budged for 14days now.

I feel its a technical error google side (well hoping it is) and will come good soon.

[davidh6781]

Well this morning its back, we hadn;t had any enquiries for days, got the gut feeling when reading it took weeks to come we thought god lets hope we can sit this out.

all is good, we did ask webmaster tools for a resubmit with a description of the errors.