301's within the site? SE functionality?

[Vulcan315]

More redirect 301 questions.. I started my company website back in '98. Until that time, I had only had a personal site and ham radio club website...so I sorta learned this stuff on the fly. Needless to say, I've made a lot of mistakes along the way. Back when I started my company site, I built it in a sub-dir of an existing site I had. So, my site was like www.othersite.com/company_site/index.html. As time moved along, I'd write pages like index1.html, entry.html, etc...while I was experimenting with different looks and such.

I began to notice that SE's had found all the other entry pages, and I needed the traffic, so I let it be. Now I find myself with about 8 entry pages...whew! I have about 11 people here who are dependant on a paycheck, and with about 70% of our business coming from the web, I've been reluctant to mess with it. It is getting to be a nightmare to keep all the pages operating in the same version, and I'm wondering if it's hurting me since there are a lot of incoming links to all these different pages (as opposed to them being pointed at our main URL.

Now, I the original address, www.othersite.com operating with the same info, and no need for all those other entry page. In an effort to consolidate this, and maybe get credit for all the incoming links to the varous entry pages, I'm wondering if I can use a redirect in the .htaccess file to point incoming links to the main page... Any thoughts? I;m thinking something like:

redirect 301 /business/entry.html [othersite.com...]
redirect 301 /business/index1.html [othersite.com...]
redirect 301 /business/index2.html [othersite.com...]

...and so on...

#1- Will this work to send visitors coming to the old entry pages to the front door
#2- Will the SE's see this and give me credit for the links towards the root url
#3- Will the SE's recognise the 301s and eventually crawl through the front door, instead of through the alternative entry pages?

Sorry for all the questions, and thanks in advance for everyone's patience with this greenie :-)

Dave

[Vulcan315]

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