Weird Sitelink Issue

[Dev]

Hello everyone!

I've run into a pretty confusing issue with a client of mine. I work primarily with car dealerships and the typical sitelinks you see under their SERPs are their profit center pages (New inventory, used inventory, etc). However with one of my clients their sitelinks are showing one with the slug as the title.



The main page for Used Inventory listings is

http://www.darcarstoyotaoffrederick.com/used-inventory/index.htm

.... The page with the URL ending in just /used-inventory/ isn't even in the sitemap but clearly it exists. We have tried setting up a 301 but it didn't work. We have demoted the sitelink in webmaster tools (several months ago) and it is still appearing in the SERPs.



If we cannot get Google to show the correct page we would at least like for it to display a page title and not the slug for the page. Does anyone have an idea of how we should proceed?

Thank you all very much for your time and help on this confusing issue!!
- Dev

 

[djbaxter]

Try putting this at the top of your .htaccess file:

directoryIndex index.htm
Options All -Indexes

That should take Googlebot to the actual page at least and in due course it should be corrected.

Also check: Are there any navigation links anywhere on the site that match the URL Google is showing?

 

[Dev]

Thanks DJ! Unfortunately our sites don't have an htaccess file and if they did the analysts wouldn't have access to server side stuff anyway.

 

[djbaxter]

Thanks DJ! Unfortunately our sites don't have an htaccess file and if they did the analysts wouldn't have access to server side stuff anyway.

Can you not get in touch with the IT people for that company, or have your clients do it?

 

[Dev]

We do everything in house. We build their websites then optimize them. With no htaccess file I'm not sure what I should say in my request to our IT department.. They said they set up a 301 from that page to the proper page with /index.htm at the end of it but for some reason the redirected page is still fully accessible but nowhere to be found on the site's sitemap.

 

[djbaxter]

Do you know if they are running on a *Nix/Apache platform? or is it an MS Server?

 

[Dev]

I will look into this. Thanks for your help DJ!