Will This 301 Redirect Help Our Crawling Problem?

[kegan5]

I have websiet in work and before we took over the company obviously had done some kind of listing on google...

Google lists www.example.com/defaultsite as a page however our websites don't use this as a folder so I can only assume that this was soemthing done before we took control of the site.

The website isn't being crawled it's almost as if ilooks for this default folder, realises it doesn't exist and then moves away from the site...so as not to index any other page from this webssite.

I think I should be able to do a 301 Redirect to the actual index page that does exist, however... the htaccess file would be sitting in a sub folder e.g. www.example.com/agents/agentcode/htaccess

Is it possible to do such a redirect ?

[edited by: tedster at 3:23 pm (utc) on April 2, 2008]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

It certainly is possible to 301 redirect that url. But if you are currently serving a 404 http status in the server header, there shouldn't be a problem and Google should just drop it. I would use a server header checker to be sure.

Do you have a Webmaster Tools account? Even though the reports are sometimes buggy, you can usually get valuable information in there about crawling problems for your website. What you describe sounds very odd - one bad url doesn't commonly stop googlebot from requesting others.

Note, I don't think that placing an htaccess file in a different directory is the way to do accomplis this. For help on the technical details, try our Apache Webserver Forum [webmasterworld.com].

[kegan5]

Yeah I do have google tools set up, the error it's giving is...

http://www.example.com/defaultsite 404 (Not found) 26-Mar-2008

*There is no folder called */defaultsite

We have 90+ websites that are all created in the same way using a custom building system, 95% of the other sites perform well, and the text on each site is always read through to ensure it's written well for the user, and includes in some way 'keywords'.

Google is listing 2 pages in total the home page, and a contact page.

The contact page is fine the description it gives under the url is what we have created and wanted, however the description underneath the index page which is also listed is still showing a description of 'Affordable hosting, domain names....etc' Which I can only assume was done before we took control of this website.

I have set this website to be located in the UK, not sure if that would have caused some issues although I can't see why it would.

Another note, we have another website with a .uk.com domain which was put live just after the .eu one mentioned here.... the .uk.com website has still not been indexed. All of our other sites are done within 2-3 weeks sometimes even less time.

I have added them to the open Directory.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:31 am (utc) on April 3, 2008]
[edit reason] examplified url [/edit]