Possible Penguin 2.1 fix - Anybody tested this?

[OnlineAssetPartners]

Possible Penguin 2.1 fix?

This happened to client site - Stay with me - this takes some explaining…

A clients home page is set as index.html

Which in domain settings goes to the root address: http://www.domain.com/

But is a setting on a domain/hosting - you can set any page to the root-

I always link directly to the root address (the second one)

So if you set the new root page as http://www.domain.com/index.htm --- going to the root - essentially is a new page- any previous poor linking would be then broken and would have no effect

So it would be a matter of changing the domain settings to use the index.htm page (which would function exactly the same- internal link structure of site goes to the root)

thoughts?

[OnlineAssetPartners]

Thanks- we have seen Unnatural links warnings come in as well (other domains) -ranking dropped we left it for a week- and it came back to the same place....

Undecided at this point what i will do- might start with Disavow of links....and go from there...

[BeanstalkIM]

If I had to place my money of what would happen next from what I've seen int he past I would put it on one of two things assuming you are 301 redirecting to the new homepage:

1 - Nothing.  Penalty passes instantly or is already assigned to the domain which was part of what the focus of Penguin 2.1 was about.  Matt Cutts, discussing this update said:

"The previous iteration of Penguin would essentially only look at the home page of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper and has a really big impact in certain small areas."

or ...

2 - Google gets tricked and passes the weight but not the penalty.  In this event the rankings will likely last somewhere between 1 and 3 weeks before the penalty follows.  I've seen this happen as well but mainly in cases where the penalty was an "unnatural links" warning.

Google luck and if you go for it, I'd love to hear how it turns out.

[MikeRoberts]

I see one of two things happening with that... Either your prior homepage 404s which will hurt you even more or your prior homepage will redirect to the new one and nothing will have changed.