Usually, I believe Google tries to act logically. Since I began researching SEO back in 2007, all of the theories made sense. So, as I approach new problems, I try to think them through logically and analyze why Google would do such a thing! My latest problem arose in the beginning of April, when I lost some of my major rankings on Google.
After I noticed that my rankings disappeared, I began to research why. It appears that Google reclassified all (or most) of my links to healthplanone.com/index.html. I find this particularly interesting because the site has always been .asp and most recently .aspx. But for some unknown reason, Google’s Webmaster Tools is telling me that I have 100 links going to healthplanone.com/index.html. But wait, this gets even better. As I begin to dig deeper into this issue, I begin researching where these links are coming from and where they are pointing to. As I look through all of these links, I notice that every single link cleanly links to www.healthplanone.com. Just as planned.
Now I need to input some logic into this problem and try to understand why Google is doing this to me. But before we try to figure out why, to quickly remedy this problem, we added a 301 redirect on healthplanone.com/index.html to healthplanone.com. Quick and easy fix, although the results have not returned yet.
Well, I’ve done a little research. Apparently there are other folks out there who have had this same problem. I can’t really make any solid predictions as to why Google has made this change for my site and not everyone else’s. It seems to be a pretty rare occurrence and others experiencing it are rather sparse. But I have come to the conclusion that Google may be slowly changing the process they view links. If Google begins to capture all of your links at homepage.com/index.html, than it will have the ability to capture all of your links without missing any. Also, it may help Google view both sites without viewing them as duplicate content.
Any thoughts?
