Why is my home page not being indexed?

The site has been crawled but the index page is not there!!

[rycrostud]

I submitted a clients site about a month ago. It's been crawled by Google and Lycos but something very bizarre is happening.

The homepage is /index.php but the only page that is appearing in the SEs is /info.php - a page that is not part of the main site and is not linked to from any other part of the site.

What am I doing wrong? I thought I'd done a reasonable job of the META tags, plenty of visible descriptive text on the home page and all plain text links.

[Marcia]

rycrostud, it's not that long ago that you submitted, so it will probably take a while longer. The .php issue will be covered in this thread [webmasterworld.com] in the Website Technology Issues forum.

It would probably be a good idea to arrange for a couple of good inbound links from sites that are already indexed, which can be more effective than actually submitting. Also, if you haven't already, submitting to Open Directory Project [dmoz.org] is a must.

[rycrostud]

Thanks for the advice. I posted the same question on the thread you suggested - I think that thread's been inactive for some time. Perhaps I'll start a new one.

I've also posted the question on an alternative forum site - they are advising me to create an html page, containing meta tags & descriptive text in a hidden layer and redirect to my php home page. Don't really want to do that though cos it might be considered spam.

[Marcia]

Smart thinking to double check, rycrostud. I don't like the words "hidden" and "redirect."

No need to add another thread, it's an issue that comes up periodically and it'll get an answer.