Is this kind of URL a Google Indexing Issue?

[Propools]

When I use the site command and search for specifics, I get what appears to be some mixed up linkage,

Let's say that I search for:

site:example.com .htm

I get back a result of:

300 Multiple Choices
The document name you requested ( /instructions.phpproductname/index.htm )
could not be found on this server. However, we found documents with ...
www.example.com/instructions.productname/index.htm

Notice in the display URL there's a .php and a .htm, why?

Let me digress for a few lines. We recently switched from static to dynamic. So, we went from '.htm' pages to '.php'. In doing this we did about 450 permanent redirects.

Additionally, we created a standardized sitemap.xml page, which is created/updated when changes are made.
I've searched the httpd.conf and sitemap.xml and there are NO instances of URL's like these anywhere in the files, so is there something amiss? Well, I know there is, but neither my programmer nor I have an idea of what it might be.

Anyone have any suggestions as to why this might be happening? Keep in mind, I'm NOT a programmer, I'm a marketer with probably just enough programming knowledge to make me dangerous. :o

[edited by: tedster at 8:49 pm (utc) on Mar. 14, 2008]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

You can get what looks like two "file extensions" when the main url calls a scripted function and the second apparent extension belongs to the url that the function processes. However, I would expect to see a ? or a / after the first apparent extension. The concatenation really wipes out the meaning of the "php".

If the server actually resolves this url (and if it shows up in Google, then I guess it does), then it does create a problem. Since you're not the programmer, I'd say get your programmer to dig into it - there's something going on with your technology that you should fix. I would first suspect a typo of some kind, perhaps in the rewriting function.

[Propools]

from my programmer:

I assume he's talking about where I'm using the Path Info URL string to pass info to, eg, family.php, like where I go /family.php/1234/index.html. That's perfectly valid, and not a problem, and that's not what's happening here. (As he says, it's delimited with a slash.) What's happening here is, Google is mashing up two completely unrelated URLs, and getting a valid 300 "multiple choices" page because of mod_speling. Why it's doing that is one question I'm interested in answering; what to do about it is another.