folder browsing

Static vs .htaccess

[experienced]

Hi,

issue is, when we create a static folder then google does not pick the folder url like this www.example.com/folder/ but when we create folders through .htaccess then most of the time google pick both the urls www.example.com/folder/ and www.example.com/folder/index.html

i can make the www.example.com/folder/ is 404 but i dont want this to be 404 and don't want this to be in google as well. I don't have any direct link to this url from anywhere but still this is the issue i have in my .htaccess.

Should i make this url www.example.com/folder/ 404 and and let the google crawl and remove accordingly. or i should have it running both the urls and google will leave the without index.html url bcoz it is not linked from anywhere..?

can you pls guide

thanks a lot

[edited by: jdMorgan at 2:13 pm (utc) on April 4, 2008]
[edit reason] example.com [/edit]

[jdMorgan]

...most of the time google pick both the urls www.example.com/folder/ and www.example.com/folder/index.html

If there are no links to www.example.com/index.html, then this indicates a problem with the coding or order of your rewriterules. And that is the problem that must be fixed, instead of adding more code to work around the problem.

Correct the code you've got, don't add more.

Jim

[experienced]

Jim,

Thanks a lot for the reply, but it is not the www.example.com/index.html but it is www.example.com/anyfolder/ which is creating the issue. Now i have done the all folder which are called without index.html will be 404. bcoz i tried changing my htaccess and did not work...

can anybody suggest me, i am using the same order in other projects and they are working fine, there is not folder indexed with the similar issues.

thanks

[experienced]

can i post my htaccess code here to chk if possible...

[experienced]

today i checked my submitted xml site map in google. Google says that your some of the urls in site map, are not found. I checked that there is no url listed in site map which is not found.

Can anybody suggest any solution.

==========
Line Status Details
- URLs not accessible
When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot due to an HTTP status error. All accessible URLs will still be submitted. HTTP Error:
Found: 404 (Not found)
www.example.com/myfolder/
www.example.com/myfolder1/
www.example.com/myfolder2/
www.example.com/myfolder3/
Apr 9, 2008
=====================================

But i dont have any similar url in my xml site map .. I believe that this is the .htaccess issue as suggested by the jim. But not sure how to change the rule order to get rid of this issue..

Additionally - i have 54 url in xml site map but google says that it is only 24 url in xmlsite map.

Total URLs in Sitemap 24
Indexed URLs in Sitemap 21

Pls help

[jdMorgan]

Take the URLs in the list from Google and type them into your browser in the exact format shown in Google's error report. If they do not return a 404, then this is simply a Google error. If they do return a 404, then post only that part of your code that you have a question about.

You should also look at your server's raw error log -- information in that file is often quite specific about what the problem is.

Jim

[experienced]

One of my old site was using the same .htaccess file with the rules and was working properly since 2 years. From april this year google started crawling the folder pages for that site as well. I tried modifing the order of the rules but nothing is happening. I have lost the PR of the old pages due to the 2 version of the same page

www.example.com/folder/index.html old page
www.example.com/folder/ new page

What should i do.. any help..

[TheMadScientist]

I would redirect the /index.html to the directory root.

See this thread to get started:
Redirect index.html to directory [webmasterworld.com]