excess files impact on spiders/ranking

As a newbie, I am adding new content to existing web sites and noticed many
files left over from the design or test phase. Can those excess files help
or hurt content ranking? If it helps, why not create 4-5 same homepages and
have 1 as index and the other 4 unlinked?

Articus wrote:

As a newbie, I am adding new content to existing web sites and noticed many
files left over from the design or test phase. Can those excess files help
or hurt content ranking? If it helps, why not create 4-5 same homepages and
have 1 as index and the other 4 unlinked?

If you're using apache, put this in .htaccess in your htdocs dir.

ErrorDocument 404 /index.html

This way, you can remove the old pages, and the traffic from Google will
still go to your home page.


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Motiv8x
Top25Web.com: Ranking Report & Search Engine Forums
http://www.top25web.com