Home page URL disappears in Google after switching to WordPress

[johnzhel]

It was a 10 page static HTML page website. 3 year old, PR2.

Monday night, copied a WordPress from somewhere to this website's public_html folder and activate it.

The home page was "index.html" before switching to WordPress. Now this html file (index.html) has been deleted, so WordPress' Home page can work.

All other 9 static html pages are still there in Google index.

Just notice it today that the home page URL disappears in Google completely. Why?

All other 9 static html pages' URL are still in Google.

robots.txt is Allow: /

What may have gone wrong to remove the home domain URL from Google index?

Thank you for your help!

[abela]

I think you deleted all the coding of homepage with html in order to get WordPress homepage. WordPress is quite different from html. You now quite well we make web page of WordPress format on open source platform. While moving from html to WordPress you just need to configure your settings with the copy of database configure on the site. These days I am also changing the html based templates into Joomla Templates and WordPress Templates I am doing this thing by configuring the settings.

[johnzhel]

If I keep the initial HTML home page index.html, http://www.my-domain.com will show this page, not the wordpress home page (which is index.php). That is why I had to delete the old home page index.html.

[Ding0]

Alternatively, you can just redirect your index.html page to your current page. That way google will also know the page has been removed and thus its being redirected and all links juice for index.html will transfer to your new index page.

[johnzhel]

(07-28-2011 09:04 PM)Ding0 Wrote:  Alternatively, you can just redirect your index.html page to your current page. That way google will also know the page has been removed and thus its being redirected and all links juice for index.html will transfer to your new index page.

The domain was previously showing the content of index.html, and now it shows the content on index.php (wordpress). But from visitor/search engine point of view, they should not see any different, simply because the URL is the same, no matter I had index.html there or have index.php for now, the home URL is the same, which is something like: http://www.my-domain-name.com - that is what has been disappearing in Google and is what I need to bring back to Google?

I don't care about whether or not Google indexs URL/page: http://www.my-domain-name.com/index.php or http://www.my-domain-name.com/index.html (should I?) I only care about http://www.my-domain-name.com (is that right?)

Do you think I still need to 301 the ./index.html or ./index.php ?

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(07-28-2011 08:02 AM)abela Wrote:  I think you deleted all the coding of homepage with html in order to get WordPress homepage.

Yes, exactly. If I kept the index.html there in the same directory as WordPress, WordPress' home page (index.php) won't show when people type http://www.my-domain-name.com - it would show index.html's content instead. So I deleted index.html.

[trafficmystic]

you could just add a page extension plugin to word press and use the .html extension and rename the pages to match the ones you previously had ranked..