Home page (s) deindexed

[therealmarkhall]

Ok odd one. 2 sites hosted on go daddy, neither sites has any cause for concern. But both sites have had there home pages deindexed or - 10000 penalty for no reason. We do the SEO for 1 site and not for the other. The server is shared with go daddy no idea on how many other 3rd party sites are on it. I've filed a reinclusion request for both sites. Any help is more than welcome.

[KaneJamison]

You're going to have to give a lot more information to properly diagnose a site being indexed. Unfortunately there are a number of potential issues, if not multiple. If you're comfortable posting the domain name, that would be a start.

[therealmarkhall]

What more info do you require, I cant post the URL

[KaneJamison]

Gotcha. Unfortunately it's really difficult to diagnose without a full range of information to look at. For example, here's a random assortment of things that might cause your home page to dissappear:

Code issues: Implementing noindex on any pages, incorrect use of rel=canonical, robots.txt updated incorrectly

Backlinks: It would take a heck of a lot of crappy spam links to get both domains entirely removed I believe. Something like that would be more likely if there were shady things being done on site, like cloaking or other activities explicitly listed in the Webmaster Guildelines: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

Content: Is the content on both homepages unique?

Google issues: Any of the panda updates could potentially affect your site, although the homepage entirely dissappearing sounds drastic. Check through the recent algo updates here: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change and see if any of them seem applicable to the client.

Are there any alerts in your Google Webmaster Tools area that would give you a clue?

You say that there are two sites owned by the same client, and they both disappeared all of a sudden? To me that suggests either

• (A) someone screwed up the robots.txt or noindex or canonical tags,
• (B) something shady was done on both sites, or
• (C) this is a case of user error and the site hasn't actually been deindexed, but appears to be for whatever reason.

[therealmarkhall]

Many thanks for the reply. Here's some answers No one has touched the code or made any recent changes to the site, there's no Robots txt , no follow and the canonical links are working ok Back links are fine, nothing untoward at all, and there is nothing tht breaks any guidelines Both sites are 100% different not even in the same areas, we only work on one site but the client has 2 sites on a shared server an they both have the missing home page (doesn't even rank for brand terms) I've just checked in webmaster tools and although there are no messages or errors I've just spotted that the http://www home page is showing as a 404, which is incorrect as you can type it in and view it with no errors. The site is set to resolve at the non www. This is set in the CMS (wordpress) with the canonical link and within webmaster tools

[KaneJamison]

The 404 sounds strange. Not sure what would make that occur, but if everything else you have said is correct, that's the only signal thus far that anything is wrong. I would continue down that path and try to figure out what is causing GWT to report the 404, because that will likely be related to why the homepages are no longer indexed.

[therealmarkhall]

There is no 404 though, the page is there just not in the results