Ok, so I’m not perfect. A few months ago, my homepage fell out of the SERPs and my pagerank started to do crazy things. It was right around the time that I switched to the Thesis theme and made some other changes to my site. Alas, this tends to be the site I experiment on, but I was having trouble figuring out why my homepage wasn’t getting indexed. For the past couple months I attributed it to the php 301 redirect I have on my site where it forwards you from http://(.*).spidermarket.com to http://www.spidermarket.com/index/. I left it because I was interested in seeing if Google was really having trouble reading my redirect (which really is a standard redirect). Alas, I was completely wrong.
Combing through my code tonight, I discovered that the rel canonical link on my homepage was pointing at my most recent post. I rectified the issue by changing my homepage from a static page to “Your Latest Post” in the options under “Settings>>Reading”. God knows why I’d set it to a static page. That makes no sense. But I’m excited that my page will finally get indexed correctly. I had, for a time, sort of resolved that my site would never index correctly again. I guess it goes to show that even good SEOs can make rookie mistakes… We learn, we move forward, and hopefully, if your site is doing the same thing, you stumble on my post and it helps you solve the problem.
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