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Posted by: philwinter Jan 5 2012, 04:19 PM

Hello, I hope this topic is not too far afield. A while back, I created a web site for a client which has an embedded slide show on the home page. This slide show resides in a folder separate from the normal page HTML. My client called me this morning to report that when he does a search for his site in Bing, it displays the slide show but without the surrounding home page. In other words, Bing has indexed the slide show page instead of the home page.

To (hopefully) fix this problem, I (1) removed anything that could be used as a keyword from the slide show itself, (2) I changed directories for slide show, and (3) I renamed the old slide show directory so that Bing would not find it any more. So far, that has worked, but now I get a page not found if I do a Bing search - but I expected that. My questions are (1) is there a way to force Bing to index the index.html page? Secondly, is there any way to get rid of the search results that produce the page not found error. Or, do I simply have to wait until Bing re indexes the site and hope for the best? BTW, Google has not had this problem.

Thanks for any help.

Phil

Posted by: Darin McGrew Jan 5 2012, 04:25 PM

This is essentially a variant of the problem described in the FAQ entry http://www.htmlhelp.com/faq/html/frames.html#frame-context

Posted by: Christian J Jan 5 2012, 05:42 PM

Bing probably has, but perhaps ranks it much lower than the framed(?) slideshow page. Can't say without seeing the site, though.


Don't know about Bing, but I recall Google has sometimes linked to pages for a long time after they're gone.

I'd put the slideshow directly in the index page file (using no frames or iframes). Then I'd either put a new page at the URL where the slideshow used to be, containing a link to the index page and this directive in the HEAD section:


or make the server send a permanent redirect header from the removed URL to the index page (details depend on server).

Posted by: philwinter Jan 6 2012, 10:00 AM

Thank you both for your replies. Christian, if I put a new page in the directory where the slide show used to be, would the new page simple consist of an anchor tag (a link to the home page) and the meta tag you show above?

Thanks!

Posted by: Christian J Jan 6 2012, 10:34 AM

In theory I recall you only need a Doctype and a TITLE element to make a valid HTML document. In practice I don't know if search engine bots need even a TITLE for a page like this (as opposed to a normal web page, where the TITLE is important for your ranking), but I guess it doesn't hurt to use one. The link should have meaningful link text, e.g. the name of the web site.

Posted by: philwinter Jan 6 2012, 11:07 AM

Thanks, Christian for the help with the meta tag. Here's what finally did the trick: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.xxxxxx.com">
Normally, this could cause problems with the back button, but since the problem only occurred from a Bing search result, it simply goes back to the search results list, which is fine. Whew! Now, my client will be happy!

Thank you all!

Posted by: Christian J Jan 6 2012, 11:19 AM

Not sure if that will make search engines stop linking to the page, though. At least combine it with the ROBOTS tag.


Doesn't it actually prevent the browser from going back to the search result list?