Where’s My F&*#ing Home Page?!

That was the subtext of the email a client sent me last Wednesday.

He had just launched his beautiful new site and had received a boatload of press attention. Yet the home page of the site was not appearing in Google’s index even though every other page was.

We submitted a sitemap to Google and filed for a reinclusion request Wednesday night. Finally on Sunday night I noticed that the home page was now in the index. We still only rank #4 for searches for www.<theclientsite>.com but that’s better than nothing.

This is the second time I have seen this happen recently. SEOOverflow had a similar experience. In both cases the domain had a previous owner. In my client’s case I suspect that the previous owner was a spammer. Not sure about SEOOverflow though.

If this happens to you I suggest you click here and then here.