Home Page Vanished

by 10 replies
11
I have a site where the home page is no longer showing up for any search terms yet internal pages show without a problem. It is a Google only issue as other SE's show the page fine.

This happened around penguin time but I would have thought that would affect the whole site rather than just one page - does anyone have any suggestions/ideas on how to resolve this?
#search engine optimization #home #page #vanished
  • No one can really give a satisfactory answer to your problem without examine your site but i will list a few possible causes:

    1. Over optimization of your site home page title, image
    2. Under optimization of your site home page
    3. Duplicate or irregular content
    4. Poor links
    5. Non diversification of your home page anchor
    6. Use of do follow only

    E.T.C
  • There can be any number of reasons or it can be a freak thing. That happened on one of my sites a few weeks ago when I had a split-test running on the home page and G couldn't crawl much of the content due to how the javascript tags work. A week after the test it was back up.
  • Is your homepage showing up in Google? If not then your site has been deindexed by Google.
  • What shows up when you google:

    site:yourdomainname.com

    Is anything indexed?
  • That's how penguin hit me. Main url nowhere to be found, but some internal pages still come up. In other words, some pages of my site were affected, while others were not. And yep, the ones affected were the ones that I over-optimized on anchors...
  • Thanks for the replies.

    Heft:- I have 163 pages indexed which is about right considering the blog section of the site. One thing I have noticed is that the displayed title for the index page is different to the title in the meta tag.

    Johnben:- It is possible that the keyword anchors are not diverse enough. I have 4 terms over 10% of anchors, 1 at 25% two at 16% and one at 11%. Open site explorer is showing 299 links from 27 linking root domains.

    Could it be the links then that are affecting that page?
  • OK - It's good to know they haven't deindexed your site...

    Don't worry about the page title, sometimes if Google doesn't think you title is informative enough they choose there own.

    Have you tried running a rank tracker to see exactly where you are ranked?

    Also have you looked within analytics? Is there a certain date that the amount of visitors dropped??
    • [1] reply
    • It would appear to be the beginning of March when we stopped getting traffic from Google for the primary keyword.

      I do have internal pages ranked for the term (page 6 being the highest) but not the index page.

      I also have internal optimised pages ranking fine for the respective page terms so it is just the homepage.

      I have just ran a keyword density checker - the main term is a three word term but one of these is "UK" which doesn't show. I think I read somewhere that UK is a stop word. The two word of this term has a density of 3.96% - too high do you think?
  • hmmmmm March so it could be a panda update?

    When did you last change the content on the homepage?

    3.69% - How many words have you got on the homepage?
    • [1] reply
    • Main body content hasn't been changed for a while to be honest. The page itself is updated every couple of days as new articles are added to the blog.

      There are 191 words in the main body text (not including headers or image tags.)
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    Home Page Vanished

    I have a site where the home page is no longer showing up for any search terms yet internal pages show without a problem. It is a Google only issue as other SE's show the page fine. This happened around penguin time but I would have thought that would affect the whole site rather than just one page - does anyone have any suggestions/ideas on how to resolve this?