Page 2 - Front page de-indexed

I did the DC checks you suggested and cannot find our main site front page anywhere.
The site which comes up first in all the DC's is the front page of the other domain of ours.
The remainder are mostly our main site inside pages
The resellers page about us generally appears in third position

"In your case a quick fix might be adding the url of that cached page to Google’s add my site feature"; sorry, I don't really understand what you are saying here.

Re your comment of "Why does it happen? Personally I feel its in the way Google now crawls. With all their penalties and filters there is collateral damage they really don't care about", I think I couldn't agree more!

Many thanks for all your help

When its only the frontpage you didnt get banned and your site will reapear. It happened to me several times.

Get used to it.

Go to the front page of Google. Then click about Google. Now click submit your content to Google. Then click add your URL to Google. If you add that others sites URL you might get Google to crawl it and the duplicate content issue is resolved. That could be the quick fix. No guarantee.

In some cases, not all, Google will follow the links from one site to another that has a similar theme and bump the index page of the other site. This can see-saw back and fourth with each index page being seen at various times and sometimes both at other times. It seldom happens but it definitely happens. That's why through the years many people who utilize a similarly themed back-up for their main site (which is a wise idea) claim its best to put the content on different servers. Always remember though when you use the exact same content or any re-used content of others it has the potential to blow up in your face at any point in time.

PRVulture is correct but in the past year many different forum posters have suggested that Google is targeting index pages because they feel that is where most of the abuse is taking place.

Yours sound likes some navigational structure issues with a few duplicate content problems.

Thanks for the advice, will give it a try.

I also spoke to the reseller about this potential duplicate problem as they are a big reseller for numerous magazines. They have a lot who have given them the same copy as they have on their own sites and have had another customer who has the same problem as us. They are now advising the publishers who use them to write different copy on their description page.

We ourselves only use our own original content, it's other sites picking up on our article content and re-using it. (In the reseller case above, though, it was our fault giving them the same copy for the description page about us.) It's always a danger for publishers to have their work re-used without them knowing and with the internet it is easier than ever for others to take work which they don't own and use it, as it's pretty impossible to police all day every day. I don't know how any publisher resolves this.

I've noticed with some of our competitors on their SERPs that there are often many sites above them which have quoted content from their articles, so it seems quite a problem all round. Of course, it's never so bad if there is a link back to you but often these people take the bulk of the article and don't quote you as source. If I find cases of this I usually email the people concerned and they put it right but you can't capture all cases.

Just a question please. The site which is being returned for us consistently in the first page of the SERPs now is the 2nd domain. Do you think we should point all our domains with a 301 to that domain which is being returned in the results? Do you think if we 301 the domain of which the front page has been de-indexed, that will adversely affect the other domain?

I'm happy to wait and see if necessary as I don't want to do anything which would make matters worse but if doing 301's on all the domains to this one which is being returned would be good, then I'll happily do that.

Sorry if I'm sounding repetitive but it is worrying me (as you can no doubt tell).

Thank you