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Why would you redirect the naked domain to home.html? I'd personally would have that home.html renamed to the default page that your server serves as the index, probably index.html and then look if there are any canonical tags in home.html pointing to the named domain + if there are any restrictions for robots to index the page, in the file itself and in the robots.txt file. If you can provide us with the URL, we would be able to check a little deeper. Hope that helps.

A lot of sites saw a drop in mid November but there was no announced update.  You can read a good discussion of what some site owners saw in the comments on this post: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-nov15-17689.html My gut instinct is that this was a refresh of the Panda algorithm, but Google no longer announces these refreshes so no one can know for sure. But, there really isn't an easy answer to your question as there isn't an obvious solution.

Hello John, This is a very good question, and something people don't often think about when blocking the navigational paths on their site from being crawled. Depending on how fast your category pages load and how many products are on each of them, you may consider a View All Canonical page: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html There are many different ways to handle faceted navigation problems, including javascrpt, GWT parameter handling, robots meta, robots.txt, rel canonical... and combinations of these. The right approach should be customized for your specific needs. When possible, I prefer to allow Google to crawl and index down to a certain level of faceting, similar to allowing them into sub-categories (though it depends entirely on your taxonomy) but not tertiary (i.e. sub-sub) categories. For the next couple of levels I might allow them to crawl, but not index. And once it gets down to 4 or 5 levels deep (e.g. /?category=1&size=5&color=blue&price=low&this=that&so-on=so-forth...) I just block them from being both indexed and crawled (i.e. Meta NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW or robots.txt block) to save crawl budget by avoiding spider traps. With all of that said, if you are giving Google an XML sitemap that contains the indexable URLs to all of your products they should have no problem indexing them, regardless of whether or not they can crawl all the way through your faceted navigation.

Right on. Yeah, I would just leave them as 404s and if they are indexed by Google, they will eventually be removed from the index. Mike

Would you mind sharing the solution - if not related to domain intricacies Curious to know - only for knowledge purpose Many thanks

All my clients are impatient with Google's crawl.  I think the speed of life on the web has spoiled them.  Assuming your site isn't a huge e-commerce or subject-matter site...you will get crawled but not right away.  Smaller, newer sites take time. Take any concern and put it towards link building to the new site so Google's crawlers find it faster (via their seed list).  Get it up on DMOZ, get that Twitter account going, post videos to Youtube, etc.  Get some juicy high-PR inbound links and that could help speed up the indexing.  Good luck!

Thanks for the response John.  That makes sense.