A Problem with all search engines getting my site listed when my site runs in the Catalog folder

[danzie1]

Hey,

 

I decided to submit my site to a few search engines having installed header tags controller, all products, sitemap, and google sitemap, ultimate SEO URL, and i added a robot.txt file to www.mysite.com/robot.txt

 

PLus fixed up some content...

 

Now my site runs under

 

http://mysite.com/catalog - But search engines only except http://mysite.com so its not getting to the important catalog page, even though i submit this url www.mysite.com/catalog -where all the content, sitemaps, SEO url begins, and sitemaps are....

 

Heres the meta info that the search engines detect......

 

Index of /

... Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.mysite.com Port 80 ...www.mysite.com - 887 - Cached - More pages from this site - Save - Block

 

Which is absolutely pointless as none of my keywords or anything exist on this page as i created oscommerce in the /catalog/ directory

 

Hope this all makes sense and someone can help, thats had the same problem

 

Do i need to have a redirect from www.mysite.com to www.mysite.com/catalog - but ive heard its bad for search engines?

 

Or can i design a page at www.mysite.com, that somehow links to (or is the same as www.mysite.com/catalog)

 

Or do i just need to wait (its now been 2 weeks) and still no crawling to my pages has occurred to my knowledge

 

Geeze this is such a huge issue for me thats been bugging me for weeks.

 

I hope this all makes sense i just wanna lay all my information out for everyone so they can help me, please!

 

oh by the way if you type in just my site www.mysite.com without /catalog/ this is all you get -

 

Index of /

Name Last modified Size Description

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Parent Directory 06-Oct-2005 00:00 -

catalog/ 17-Sep-2005 05:51 -

cgi-bin/ 02-Sep-2005 03:43 -

robots.txt 10-Sep-2005 02:22 1k

 

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.mysite.com Port 80

 

 

Thanks!

[Darklings]

If you dont use - or there is nothing else important on your http://yoursite.com then you can make an index.html page there - that refreshes (using a script - i'm sure the internet(google) will show up many pos solutions) to refresh your site to your catalog.. no one will notice that (refresh in 0sec...)

 

 

Kind Regards,

Tom

[danzie1]

Thanks for your post

 

so what your saying is create a index.html that looks like my /catalog/ file at www.mydomain.com that redirects in 0-1 seconds to my real /catalog/

 

Is that ok for the search engine, and search engines dont like redirects though do they?

 

I thought that most people have their site running in /catalog/ what things have u guys done to get your site noticed by say yahoo, that only accepts www.yoursite.com not www.yoursite.com/catalog

[danzie1]

Search engines are only picking me up as

 

Index of /

... Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.mydomain.com Port 80 ...www.mydomain.com - 887 - Cached - More

 

Do you know what i mean, it annoying, whats going on

 

I went and changed the htaccess file today

 

so that when you type in www.mysite.com it takes you to www.mysite.com/catalog/index.php ......... good idea??? what do you think?

 

Thanks

[Jack_mcs]

Don't use an html redirect. That could get you banned. Use a .htaccess redirect or, preferably, just move the site to the root.

 

Jack

[danzie1]

DirectoryIndex /catalog/index.php

 

I just added this code to my htaccess file

 

it works

 

now when u type in www.mysite.com

 

it actually displays www.mysite.com/catalog

 

Does that make sense, is it ok. Its not really a redirect? its just pointing htaccess to where my index page should land

 

now on to the search engine problem, sure im on yahoo, but its not detecting me header tags as they are /catalog/ folder etc, not on www.mysite.com

 

any ideas?

[Jack_mcs]

Any redirection in an .htaccess file is fine because it is done on the server before the SE's see it so they never know.

 

As for your other problem, are you saying that yahoo is not listing your pages correctly? If they are reaching a page of your site, then they will see the header tags. I'm not sure I understand the problem you are having.

 

Jack