Hi ecommercekid and welcome to WebmasterWorld!
Sorry but I had to remove links you have posted as example but for clarification, your issue is similar to what was previously reported in these two threads:
[
webmasterworld.com...]
[
webmasterworld.com...]
Here is what I saw which may give a better idea to members what your problem is:
- The issue is with your home page only - when doing "site:example.com", the cached version of your home page, the title in SERPs and the snippet shown are all from the other website where there was previously a banner linking to your site (and where the banner now links to a page on their own site)
- after the site: command, if clicking on "Cache" link of the home page, the text Google shows says: "This is Google's cache of
http://should-be-your-site-here-but-is-other-site-instead It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 10 Jan 2015 19:06:38 GMT..."
- Searching for exact text in quote from
your home page does not return your home page nor your site at all. Of course, if Google has the other site's content associated with your home page, (overwriting in their index your own content) then this explains why Google would not find your own content when search is performed.
It would not surprise me if you have dropped for all keywords your home page was ranking for.
<added>
I would imagine this is a technical issue that Google is not resolving properly. What I could see is that when the site was showing your banner, the link the banner was going to was to an intermediate page on their site, which then redirected using HTTP 303 "See other" status code to your site.
Once you stopped advertising, the link that lead to your banner should ideally return 404 or 410 Gone. However, what it does is that it still returns HTTP 303 "See other", but the redirect location is set to only a protocol, not specifying any site (i.e. to http:// )
So on their site, the request:
GET /banners/click/21.html HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
would now return:
HTTP/1.1 303 See other
Location: http://
which browser now interprets as "malformed URL" whereas previously it returned URL to your site under the "Location:"
It could be that Google is confused by this malformed URL and is now behaving unpredictably, caching a wrong page.
What I would suggest is that you go to Google Webmaster Tools, perform "Fetch as Googlebot" of your home page and then do "Submit to index". Potentially it could help and it will not do any harm. I presume that it will fix itself after a while.
