www.mysite.com dropped from serps

but www.mysite.com/index.php showing

[denisl]

A couple of days ago www.mysite.com appeared to have been dropped from SERPS for my common search string however www.mysite.com/index.php is showing but much lower down the list.

The home page has an item randomly pulled from a database each time the page is accessed- I seem to remember reading that this could cause a problem with a bot going back to the page and finding that it has changed.

Has this caused my problem?

I can't see why www.mysite.com isn't being listed as all external links point to that url though internal links do point to www.mysite.com/index.php

[mcavic]

though internal links do point to www.mysite.com/index.php

That's why. When Googlebot sees a link to www.mysite.com, it indexes that and drops the other one for duplicate content. Then when it sees a link to index.html, it indexes that one and drops the other.

I don't know why they wouldn't rank the same. But on internal links, you can link to "/", and it'll be the same as linking to www.mysite.com.

Random text shouldn't cause a problem at all, as long as it's not Javascript, and it works in your browser.

[denisl]

Thank you mcavic

That should be simple enough to sort out!

[apollo]

Site is now showing index.php in results and has dropped back a couple of pages. Internal links and most backlinks are all to "/". I can find only one backlink to "index.php".

Maybe something to do with the optimisation or index page penalty being placed on the "/" but allowing the "index.php" to show at a lower spot in the rankings?