Google, SEO and 301 redirects on root / top folder

Question

I've got a pretty unusual problem. A client has their site hosted on a friend's server that is basically misconfigured to redirect http://clientname.com/ to http://clientname.com/clientname. After this 301 redirect, the site works fine and subpages can be accessed via http://clientname.com/clientname/subpage.

However, the whole site is not indexed on Google and my FTP root folder resembles http://clientname.com/clientname/ which means I cannot put a robots.txt file on the top level. Moving to a different hoster is out of question for the client.

What can I do? I'm desperate.

Answer 1

If the whole site is not indexed a robots.txt isn't going to help you as that is used to stop the search engines from indexing your content. Not help them do it.

Sign up for a Google Webmaster Tools account and add their site. Then submit an XML sitemap to Google. That will tell them where all of their pages are. Also, get some links to their pages from other sites. That helps the search engines finds them and links can increase the importance of those pages in Google's eyes giving them more incentive to index them.