Site:www.domainname.com - does not find homepage in Google (only inner pages - why?)

[robk123]

When I do a Google search on site:www.domainname.com, my clients homepage does not appear. Other inner pages do.

The same thing happend a while ago and I did 'fetch by google' in Search Console. After that the homepage was indexed again when I did a site:www.domainname.com search. But now (2 weeks later), it's gone again.

When I search on the brand name of the website in Google it does find the homepage. I don't know why it doesn't find the homepage when I do a site: search.

Any ideas?

[see images where you can see the problem]

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[TimHolmes]

To all intents and purposes it would appear the Homepage file has been indexed as it can be found via branded search etc. From viewing the sites source you are not blocking anything or have any funny canonical issues. Do you have any errors in your Google Search Console.crawl reports.

Also have you anything in your robots.txt file that could be causing an issue?

[JonoAlderson]

Looks like the site is missing a robots.txt file; that could cause some issues (hit tip, Tim Holmes). I'd get one in place, just for housekeeping - search engines have been known behave oddly sometimes when they can't find a robots.txt file.

I'm struggling to see anything obvious that would cause this behaviour, but equally, I wouldn't be too concerned about it - the page is clearly indexed and discoverable, so this may just be a quirk.

[robk123]

Thank you for your answer.

• I do not have any errors in Search console regarding the homepage.
• There is no robots.txt file.

[robk123]

Thank you for your answer.

You're right. There is no robots.txt file. You're saying that I should get one in place, just for housekeeping.

But will it help if I just leave it empty? Because I do not need to disallow something, right now...

Thanks.

[JonoAlderson]

Yup, an "empty" robots.txt file should look like this:

User-Agent: *
 Disallow:

[robk123]

Thanks. I'm going to try that and I'll let you know if this helps.