11 replies to this topic

[glyn]

Just had a site redeisgn done and the homepage has been de-indexed. PR still showing so it's not a ban.

Thing is this, that nothing has been done to it, save for the redesign. I've checked for possible XSS or hidden drop links but there's nothing. Really quite perplexing.

Been like that for 3 days will give it a week before I start to panic.

I don't really follow Google's whims often, but do we now see this happen to homepages following a redesign?

Any addional checks to do

Cheers
Glyn.

[NathanielB]

Not sure about home pages being deindexed but it is very common for internal pages to out rank the home page, so maybe this is whats happening and google is just sorting out what to do with your home page.

[EGOL]

I believe that Nathaniel may have the answer.

If other pages on your site are now more relevant than the homepage or have better links than the homepage they may show in the SERPs (for a some queries) instead of the homepage.

To check if your homepage has been "deindexed".... try searching for a unique sentence from the homepage in quotes and see if it appears.

My bet, as Nathaniel's is... your redesign deoptimized the homepage.

[tam]

You didn't swap file extension eg .html to .php or something? Just a thought.

[JohnMu]

URL?

What did you do to install the redesign, was the site offline during that time?

Cheers
John

[RisaBB]

Maybe in your re-design, you did not re-put in the title tag? Maybe you changed the title tag? Maybe you used to have things in an H1,H2,H3 tag and you changed this around?

[glyn]

Hi there, and thanks...nice to see a few familiar faces in this thread and there were some checks recommended that I had forgotten about in my old age!

To reply:

I've done searches using:
site: www.domain.com
www.domain.com
Brand Name
Taken a chunk of unique text off the homepage and run it through Google in quotes.
Done the same with the <TITLE>.

homepage links: 300
number of links on page that is being returned against the search for site:domain.com: 19

I've run the above link testing on other main category channels to verify there isn't a spike that could see the domain/ being replaced by a subpage.

John. The site was not offline at the time of the redesign, it was done on the live site which means there was probably a little bit of URL mashing going on with modrewrite and stuff for a few hours.

The Page Rank on homepage is intact at 4, so I'm confident this drop out is temporary. In the past I've seen PR zero'd where someone has had a site XSS'd or drop links using hidden divs. This is not the case.

The content on the homepage has remained more or less the same. The Title Tag was modified so I could assume that Google is re-evaluating the content of the website of the homepage before saying "yes this site is amazing!". As for the other categories they had a straight replace on the title tags and other KW data as this was stored in a file historically.

What I can see is that the page that is showing up in the SERPS as the authority page (IE the one that consistently comes back when the brand terms etc as above are being used) has been crawled and it is the new website design that has been cached. Maybe I just need to wait....

Thanks for your feedback, wish I had a little more time to hang out here.

Glyn.

[jonbey]

Make sure you did not make the same mistake as I did and use 302 redirects to manage any adverts!

[glyn]

No ads, no old redirects, but i am gonna crawl the htacess just in case

[glyn]

Still waiting on Google. Come on...UPDATE!

[glyn]

I've found the problem, the homepage is not back in yet, but it will be.

The problem was some content modules that were being loaded on a 404 page automatically, which were also the same being served on the homepage. A complete fluke of the system and one that requires a little rewriting to avoid such problems.

[glyn]

I correct myself, the only problem here was my patience, although dropping out did make me look more closely at the site in question and tweak a couple of things.

The homepage is now back in, PageRank is being assimilated again. and by the next update my clients competitors that have been enjoying a few days of visibility, will be going "oph sh**" they're back again.

Thanks for all your reflections.