1 reply to this topic

[DaveBeck]

I have a situation that has me a little bit confused and bewildered

I am not sure whether this is a penalty or a glitch in the current Google algorithm.

Here is the situation:

Notice yesterday that the home page has slipped back to a PR 0 and all of the back links to the home page have disappeared. We hit the panic stations and start looking around. The system administrator assure us that there have been no server outages so start looking at other possibilities.

Whilst looking we notice that the rest of the pages on the site still have page rank and back links associated, however when this gets really interesting is when we look at the different ways of bringing up the home page.

when going to www.rentacar-southafrica.com/ - 0 PR 0 links
when going to www.rentacar-southafrica.com - 5 PR 50 links
when going to www.rentacar-southafrica.com/index.htm - 5 PR 50 links

The site has disappeared from the results of its major search terms [still showing for minor terms] and it is not in the Google directory anymore, however it is still found in the DMOZ listings.

Any advice/suggestions/explanations would be fantastic!

Dave

[Randy]

Interesting Dave. This morning I'm getting a graybar on all three of the above, though I did see the exact backlink results you did.

Also, when I did a Google search to see what pages are indexed (www.rentacar-southafrica.com site:www.rentacar-southafrica.com) it would appear that your index page isn't indexed at all.

My guess is that it's a termporary fluke by Googlebot. I didn't parse through the code closely, however the only thing I see that is the least bit interesting is your use on the main index page of dual META Robots tags. I would remove at least the second of those, though I don't see how it could cause a problem. I generally don't even use META Robot tags unless I want to block spiders from a page. The default they assume will allow the pages to be spidered, cached and links followed.

I wouldn't panic yet, that's for sure. You'll likely see things get corrected with the next crawl.