How Did Google Mess This Up?

Google really messed up the link of my homepage!

[jimh009]

Well, this is one of the stranger things I've seen in google. For the fun of it, I typed in my domain name in google to make sure it was still there. It was. But, wow, Google really somehow messed up the url of the home page.

The url is: www.xxxxxx.com/index.htm - just like every home page should be.

But, instead, what shows in Google is (both in cache and in current live version):

www.xxxxxxx.com/phpbb2/..%5C..%5C..%5Cindex.htm

When you view the properties of the link, you see this address:

[xxxxxx.com...]

What it looks like happened is that Google went into my forum, somehow got lost, and then backtracked its way back to the home page somehow, but somehow thinks my home page is buried in my forum. Now, when you pull up my home page from google, you get this completely messed up page.

I can't make sense of this at all. Anyone want to take a stab at why my home page has this huge url listed (no, there is no duplicate home pages on my site!) instead of the normal one?

Jim

[jdMorgan]

jimh009,

> [xxxxxx.com...]

One possibility is that phpbb2 is set up to use "Windows-style" pathnames, and that Google couldn't figure it out because Windows pathnames are not valid in URLs. A valid relative path from a file named /phpbb2/<something>/<something>/<something> to index.htm would be [xxxxxx.com...] - Note the slashes rather than backslashes.

Just a guess...
Jim

[skipfactor]

Hmm, I just noticed a new Freshbot error in my logs that's been bugging me today.

I get a "Incorrect_syntax_near_%" error on files that haven't changed since the last visit and never errored before and don't have spaces in the dang file or folder name.

Curiouser & curiouser...

[jimh009]

Well, google hasn't had any problems spidering the forum before - it even shows some of the forum pages in my backlinks. So, why it messed this up now is rather strange. Even odder is that when you pull up the page, the text on the page shows but all the graphics come up as broken.

But, to be safe, I just banned google from my forum. I'm now 100% positive that this is why you can't find my home page when you type in a couple of the keywords that the home page is optimized for. The page that google shows has a PR0, where as the real home page still has a PR5 (at least I didn't get a penalty on my site because of this strange thing!).

Only good news is that very few people ever hit my home page from the SE's - so no great loss in traffic I guess. Rest of the pages are doing fine in the new SERPS - better than they were last month, in fact.