Home page forwarder and spiders

[cordelia]

A couple of years ago I used a forwarder to send people coming to www.eShopAfrica.com to the home page which was www.eShopAfrica.com/acatalog/index.htm. But the problem was that the site was pretty much ignored by the search engines.

Then someone tipped me the wink and told me to put text and lot of keywords in a proper home page at www.eShopAfrica.com/index.htm and it worked - the site listings increased

I've just upgraded to Ver 7 and really would like the home page produced by Actinic at www.eShopAfrica.com/acatalog/index.htm to be the real home page. But if I put a forwarder back on to bring visitors to that page (which is what I have at the moment) I'm worried I'll be ignored by the spiders again. I don't want to stuff the forwarder with keywords and hidden text for fear of being banned

Any suggestions?

Many thanks

[I-CC]

A way around this is to create a completely blank and empty index.html file and place it within the /documents, /web or /public_html folder (dependant on your server) and then....

create a .htaccess file in the same root folder explained above with some thing like this in it.

redirect 301 /index.html http://www.eshopafrica.com/acatalog/index.htm

This should then be fine for the search engine bots and not affect you adversely...

[cordelia]

Thanks so much for your advice... it works like a charm. (although I'm not entirely sure how!) Do the spiders get automatically forwarded to the home page too?

Thanks again anyway! What matters is that it works

[I-CC]

Basically a 301 is a permament redirect that bots and that follow:

It is saying effectively that any request for the page index.html is now perm moved to acatalog/index.htm, so when a bot or browser hits that page, the htaccess kicks in, checks the filename match of index.html in the root folder and sends it onto the acatalog one :)

[cordelia]

Simple - when you know how!

[mike@rfsl]

I've just changed my site to use this forwarding method. However, i'm concerned that the spiders won't see the links on my homepage properly now.

I've tried using the spider simulator (http://www.spannerworks.com/seotoolkit/spider_viewer.asp) by putting in my domain url. The trouble here is the relative links on the page are not being created properly.

eg.
If I have a link
<a href="Remote_Control_Systems.html">Remote Control Systems</a> This is being parsed as
http://www.rfsolutions.co.uk/Remote_Control_Systems.html
instead of
http://www.rfsolutions.co.uk/acatalog/Remote_Control_Systems.html

Does anyone know if spiders would actually have this problem or if it is just the 'spider simulator' which has the problem?

[cordelia]

Good point - I have no idea how you tell the difference between spiders and spider simulators (unless they'r real!). I suppose the best thing is to make sure there are no relative urls on the home page

[Mike Hughes]

Mike,

your pages look Ok to me. Can you show me a link on the page that isn't working?

Mike

[mike@rfsl]

The actual links on the page are OK, but they don't work in the spider simulator because it thinks the base url is:

http://www.rfsolutions.co.uk/ instead of
http://www.rfsolutions.co.uk/acatalog/

I'm not sure how to change the relative url's as the home page is the top level layout page automatically generated by Actinic..

[Mike Hughes]

It looks to me like the spider simulator isn't recognising that the redirect has changed the base directory. I doubt if the SEs have the same problems and there is at least one simulator that handles the links correctly: http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/

For some reason this simulator forwarded my browser to a broken page, but you could see that it was picking up the links correctly.

Mike

[mike@rfsl]

Yes thats re-assuring, thanks Mike.

I'm not sure where its getting the '+' and '&' broken links from, i'm not particularly concerned about these though.