Home page penalty?

[tadden]

What does it mean when your home page has a penalty? I have a site that has good rankings for many pages, but my home page seems to be penalized by Google. I tried searching for my home page URL in Google, www.xxxxxx.com and my page doesn't show up, but sub pages do show up? What would cause this penalty and how do you correct this issue.

[KeriMorgret]

Have you taken a look to make sure that there's not a noindex tag on the home page, or that it's blocked in robots.txt? Is your home page in Yahoo or Bing? If you search the title tag text to see if that shows up? Does your home page return a 404 in the server header?

It's a bit harder to figure out without knowing your URL, but my first thought is to see if it's something technical where Google is behaving like it should, or if there really is some type of penalty.

EDIT: Have you verified your site in Google Webmaster Tools and looked for any messages there about your site?

[KeriMorgret]

Also, is this the same site you brought up in other posts, or is it a different site?

[tadden]

This sitee is not the same one I discussed earlier. I don't have a noindex tag and it's not blocked in robots.txt. I'm not getting a 404 error and my site is verified in Google Webmaster Tools. My site is www.officialunclaimedfunds.com.

[KeriMorgret]

There are a bunch of other affiliate sites out there that have the same copy for the home page. Take a random sentence from your home page and put it in a search engine and you'll see what I mean. That's one issue.

Another is that you seem to have some parameters indexed. In Google, I searched [site:officialunclaimedfunds.com "uncle sam" and www.officialunclaimedfunds.com/?hop=jokes&&What was indexed.

IMHO, this is just another thin affiliate site. In my few minutes of looking, there's nothing here that you can't find on a large number of other clickbank affiliate sites all selling me the exact same thing. The only advantage I see is that there aren't the ton of ads that I see on some of the other sites. Put another way, is there a reason why this page SHOULD be ranked?

[tadden]

I appreciate your advice, but I'm not looking for your moral justification for my websites. I'm a paying member of Seomoz. Most sites online(commercial) sites wouldn't meet your exceedingly high standards. Why can't you offer advice to help me fix my issue without the offhand comments about if my site should exist or not? Most commercial sites aren't up to your standards. There are thousands of commercial sites that have less content than my sites and have been highly ranked for years in Google.

[KeriMorgret]

I didn't get into anything moral about it. I'm going from Google's eyes -- if I am the search engine and I have xx sites with the same content to display, is there a reason I should display this site above any of those other xx identical sites? And is there a site out there that is better than those xx number of identical sites that offers more information? Google's out to make money too. If they don't satisfy their users with their results, their users will go elsewhere.

To go specifically to your home page question, do you know what is putting the hop parameter in there? That's likely not helping things.

I'm looking at Open Site Explorer, and this doesn't appear to be too strong of a site. It has 55 total links, from only 10 domains. The top link is from "Free For All Link Page", and there are several link pages (rather than editorial content) in your inlinks. These aren't sending the highest quality signals to your site, either.