Meta Redirect problem

please help

[guddu]

I have used meta redirect for one of outdated page of my client's website to redirect to the index page. It is working fine but Google is indexing the outdated page as if the index page. The index page is nowhere in Google.

It is crawling the index page through the outdated page and other links and is following all the links and new pages added therein but it is not showing the index page. How to get it back instead of the outdated page being shown?

(I used Meta redirect so that in due course, I could remove this page using robots.txt and Google URL removal system. But now I fear, if I remove this page, my new pages that are linked only through index page, would not be crawled and get indexed within days.)

Please advice how to do it without harming indexing of my new pages.

[Krapulator]

If you set the meta redirect so it isn't immediate (say 10 seconds) it should stop this problem.

You could also use a 301 Redirect

[guddu]

I cannot use 301 redirection as it is on geocities free server space. But why is it not showing index page. It has happened for the first time with me (Even when many were experiencing the loss of index page with their websites few days back, I had index pages for all my clients' websites shown and well ranked in Google).

The most important losss for my client is, not showing the index page, the new content on the page is not available to users istantly. They have to navigate to reach the home page to find the new content. Also, it does not show the date of last updation so we could not track when tah pages were indexed (just a vague idea).

[guddu]

please anyone have an answer? I cannot delete the page as i would loose traffic for the website unless the index page is back. What should I do?

[MyWifeSays]

Why not leave it as it is, you say the page is indexed?

You could delay the refresh by 10 seconds like Krapulator says or just have a link to the new index page from the old page.

[guddu]

OK! I will try this too and see for another two crawls.

Thanks