My website was on the top position in Google not long ago. Now its main page is not being indexed and not shown in SERPs at all, though other pages are shown and indexed. Do you know why could this happen? Please help...

We're going to have to join hands and concentrate really hard on our collective visualisation of what could be wrong.

Or you could give us the URL so we can see the page in question

gringo,

Give her a break, this is her first post





fastreplies

I know that Emily has a good sense of humour and will take my friendly 'leg pulling' as it was intended

Originally Posted by EmilyJohnson

Do you know why could this happen? Please help...

You are not alone.
Our amray.com and amrayhosting.com gone not only from G but from Yahoo and MSN as well.
Before that we had them in top 10 too.

Give a time and everything will go back to normal




fastreplies

Originally Posted by gringo

I know that Emily has a good sense of humour and will take my friendly 'leg pulling' as it was intended

Funny I really appreciated your joke.
See my PM

Emily

Originally Posted by fastreplies

You are not alone.
Our amray.com and amrayhosting.com gone not only from G but from Yahoo and MSN as well.
Before that we had them in top 10 too.

Give a time and everything will go back to normal




fastreplies

Thanks for your advice. SEO really is for patient


Emily

Nothing stands out as being obviously wrong (at least not to me). It could just be a temporary thing, that happens often.

How long has it been missing?

Originally Posted by gringo

Nothing stands out as being obviously wrong (at least not to me). It could just be a temporary thing, that happens often.

How long has it been missing?

Four days already. Is it okay?

Emily

I don't think that 4 days is a long time. But maybe other people can see something wrong with your site?

Have you done anything out of the ordinary recently?

I might be barking up the wrong tree but Yahoo! indicate some kind of mysql/php error on the home page. Maybe last time Google attempted to crawl that page it couldn't.
</wildDarkStab>

the 404 page returns a 302 response which can be a huge problem if not dealt with.

something that shows up on a site: search is you are allowing search results to be indexed. This can be a big problem as it can create duplicate URLs to content.

Originally Posted by gringo

I might be barking up the wrong tree but Yahoo! indicate some kind of mysql/php error on the home page. Maybe last time Google attempted to crawl that page it couldn't.
</wildDarkStab>

It seems that there were some problems with my server. But it might last not more than 5 minutes as I really trust my hosting provider

Originally Posted by chrishirst

the 404 page returns a 302 response which can be a huge problem if not dealt with.

Could you clear it up? I do not fully understand what you are talking about. There is a line ErrorDocument 404 www.my-site.com/404.php in .htaccess file. And if somebody types incorrect URL it redirects to 404.php page.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

something that shows up on a site: search is you are allowing search results to be indexed. This can be a big problem as it can create duplicate URLs to content.

I fixed it and hid search.php in robots.txt from all search engines. I did correct? Or there are any other ways?

a 404 page should return a 404 response. You need to make a scripted page return that response other wise it will return a 200

I guess that somewhere on 404.php you have a header(location) line that is creating the 302 redirect.

download WebBug and check the response

Originally Posted by chrishirst

a 404 page should return a 404 response. You need to make a scripted page return that response other wise it will return a 200

I guess that somewhere on 404.php you have a header(location) line that is creating the 302 redirect.

download WebBug and check the response

Thanks, Chrishirst. I really had that error. I' ve fixed it.

Emily