redirect pages?

google missing most important pages

[websitegal]

googlebot is missing our home page and the most direct links off of it, except for some older pages that we had depricated. It was suggested to me that we redirect those older pages permanently to the newer more important ones. This seems like a reasonable approach to me, but I want to get another opinion on the matter. Since the switch we've lost a lot of traffic steadily.

[bekyed]

Hi websitegal,

Which redirect did you you use

A meta refresh or by .htaccess?

Bek.

[websitegal]

I meant by .htaccess. All these pages have a text link on the home page. The newer pages (and the links to them from the home page) are more important than the older ones, but it appears Google is not visiting the home page of late, yet is visiting all of the older pages that don't have the most important links. They are not useless, but they are not nearly as important as our newer pages. The question is.. do I sit it out and hope Google will get ALL of them indexed (and hopefully revisit our home page), or do I redirect the old ones to their counterpart pages which contains newer information. This would leave off the home page on a one to one redirect (there's about 40 old pages and 40 new ones ...neatly divided so one one old would point to one of the new ones), although I suppose just ne of those older pages could be redirected to the home page instead of it's direct counterpart.

[grandpa]

Why not link the newer pages from the older pages? Something else to look at (I might be the only one to have done this) is to make sure you have the index and follow meta tags set up properly. I moved a new index page in place, and Gbot ignored it until I removed the noindex directive I was using during testing.

[websitegal]

Hi Grandpa:

Yahoo is having no problems finding the pages...... Google is avoiding the home page and new pages on it. Msn is doing something similar to Google.... but Yahoo was at the new pages and home page as recently as yesterday