.htaccess disaster for landing page

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Avalanche

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Jun 27, 2006
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Doing a landing page for a company where they already have a website setup with their own server config for a cms. We put the landing page up, but google bot nor any spider simulators seem to be able to find the page though it can be seen in browsers and when I look at live headers in FF, I don't see anything abnormal. I definitely know the search spiderss can't get it because

(A) our google campaign got killed on quality score and we do these for a living

(B) google keyword tool doesn't ever finish when I run it on that URL

(C) W3C semantic tool chokes on the URL as well..

URL is

Code:
https://www.sharedxpertise.com/finance/

we tried using

Code:
http://www.sharedxpertise.com/finance/

also and it didn't work

I'm pretty sure it's in the .htaccess that their web guy set up

Code:
RewriteEngine     On

RewriteCond    %{HTTP_HOST}    !=www.sharedxpertise.com
RewriteRule    /(.*)        http://www.sharedxpertise.com/$1 [R=301]

RewriteRule www/public-sector-meeting /file/4011/ [R=301]
RewriteRule www/finance-2008 /file/4020/ [R=301]

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$
RewriteRule ^www/finance https://www.sharedxpertise.com/finance/ [R=301,L]

Any ideas of what the heck went wrong and what we can do to fix it?
 


I think his question is that Google does not know about this site:

site:sharedxpertise.com/finance/

To the OP sorry I do not know what is going on, I will revist this when I leave work and have time to think about it.
 
If you have any sort of authentication on the site that redirects users back to a particular page you have to add those paramaters to the end of the links in your sitemap file.

For instance on some of my Adult Sites I redirect new users to the splash page then if they want to access the page the paramater verify=true is passed once then the rest is stored in sessions but Google bots do not do sessions so I had to append verify=true onto the end of all my URLs in the sitemap.php file so that the bots can properly index my website.

If your using authentication on the website have a look at that.
 
A question:
Why are you using 301 redirects for everything? I thought Google stopped indexing the original URL after awhile?

Why not something like this:
Code:
RewriteRule www/public-sector-meeting /file/4011/ [PT,L]
RewriteRule www/finance-2008 /file/4020/ [PT,L]
Since that's done on the server side I would assume everything would be happier? Not sure how most of google's stuff feels about working on stuff through 301 redirects.

And some other thoughts:
Code:
# to save having to retype the "www/" everytime:
RewriteBase   www/
# and then to be a little more flexible, so if someone went to
# http://www.example.com/finance-2008/blahblah it would still work
RewriteRule ^finance-2008 /file/4020/ [PT,L]
# just make sure not to do something like this:
RewriteRule ^finance /finance-2008 [PT,L]
# Because that is borked
 
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