Site: search doesn't return homepage first

[AdamThompson]

When searching for site:myclient.com their homepage doesn't appear first. I know some SEOs have reported this was a warning sign that there was a penalty.

Here is what I've checked/found:

• Toolbar pagerank remains strong.
• Homepage is indexed.
• SEO traffic is falling, but its been gradually falling for a year now, mainly due to the client neglecting any type of marketing campaigns or link building, I believe. There was not a specific drop that could be tied to a penalty.
• Site remains well indexed. 62,742 of 63,021 URLs in the sitemap are indexed.
• Site is a large ecommerce site, so many pages are duplicate content (product descriptions).
• Homepage does rank #1 when searching for string of text present on the homepage.
• Nothing unusual in Google Webmaster Tools
• Search for myclient.com returns homepage with 6 expanded sitelinks under it.
• Google safe browsing check shows no malware.

Anything else I should check?

[icecarats]

Are you saying the default page isn't in the site:name.com results >at all<, or just that it's not the first result? If the latter, it may be possible that there's a canonical/no-index situation going that is pushing all the internal link structure juice onto another page. I believe Google will order site: results by relevance/strength by default, and this implies either that A)the strength of the home page is weak or B)the link structure/canonical layout is passing all the home page's link juice elsewhere. This is entirely guesswork mind you, but is my first impression.

[AdamThompson]

The homepage is not in the first 5 pages of results, but there are over 60K pages on the site.

The homepage has by far the most link juice, and there are no canonicals.

Google seems to be showing all the individual product pages first. This is unusual, as you would expect the homepage, category pages, and other pages linked sitewide to appear first.

[KeriMorgret]

Here's a video from Matt Cutts about how the site: operator works and how the results are ordered. Does this help at all?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qigo05nAqKw

[neooptic]

Did you ever get anywhere with this? I'm having the same problem?