Hi,

I periodically use the Google site command to confirm that our client's websites are fully indexed.

Over the past few months I have noticed a very strange phenomenon which is happening for a small subset of our client's websites... basically the home page keeps disappearing and reappearing in the Google index every few days.  This is isolated to a few of our client's websites and I have also noticed that it is happening for some of our client's competitor's websites (over which we have absolutely no control).

In the past I have been led to believe that the absence of the home page in the index could imply a penalty of some sort.  This does not seem to be the case since these sites continue to rank the same in various Google searches regardless of whether or not the home page is listed in the index.

Below are some examples of sites of our clients where the home page is currently not indexed - although they may be indexed by the time you read this and try it yourself.  Note that most of our clients are in Canada.

My questions are:

1. has anyone else experienced/noticed this?

2. any thoughts on whether this could imply some sort of penalty? or could it just be a bug in Google?

3. does Google offer a way to report stuff like this?

Note that we have been building websites for over 10 years so we have long been aware of issues like www vs. non-www, canonicalization, and meta content="noindex" (been there done that in 2005).  I could be wrong but I do not believe that the site would keep disappearing and reappearing if something like this was the issue. Please feel free to scrutinize the home pages to see if I have overlooked something obvious - I AM getting old.

site:dietrichlaw.ca  - this site has continually ranked in the top 3 for [kitchener personal injury lawyers] for many years.

site:burntucker.com - since we took over this site last year it has moved up to page 1 for [ottawa personal injury lawyers]

site:bolandhowe.com - #1 for [aurora personal injury lawyers]

site:imranlaw.ca - continually ranked in the top 3 for [mississauga immigration lawyers].

site:canadaenergy.ca - ranks #3 for [ontario hydro plans]

Thanks in advance!

Jim Donovan, President

www.wethinksolutions.com

I have just realized that this is not working correctly at all.... the graph that I saw (and mentioned in my first post) is a graph related to MY SITE that I am tracking, not the competitor site.

I am located in Canada and using Google.ca so i wonder if this has something to do with it?

regards

Jim

I am looking at the report called:

Rankings Report for [Competitor XXX]

For all keywords in the report, the rankings on the main  page say "Not in Top 50"... however when I drill down I can see that this is not true...  there is a graph with valid rankings which were gathered as recently as March 20, 2013 (2 days ago)  is this a known bug?

Regards

Jim Donovan