Index page not indexed properly

I have posted on here before about something related to the problem I had with the company site I am responsible for. Before I arrived the domain was changed, a 302 redirect was set up by IT. This led to the old domain showing up in google for a long time, worse still, it wasn't the homepage.

The site has some great links from government and council sites and is well built so should perform well in Google. The old domain has now been dropped by google and the correct one is showing. However there is still a problem of the wrong page coming up top, the page is about the charitable part of the organisation, this is potentially very confusing for investors trying to understand what we do (it is quite complicated) etc. I suspect this is still a hangover from the 302 redirect.

To fix the problem I have submitted an xml sitemap to Google and put higher priority for the index page etc, in the hope that the site is indexed properly. The sitemap has been accepted but I was wondering how long it would take to have an effect?
Also surely the Googlebot would have been able to tell which is the homepage in the first place as it has a large number of quality links to it.

The index page is index.php, could this have an effect if googlebot looks for index.html instead? (entering this just redirects to the php index page)
Is there anything else which could be causing this?

Hi CP,

Are you unable to change the 302 to a 301?
It could be that you have a particularly relevant/valuable link aimed at the page that shows up, but it's also likely to depend on the search terms entered... (unless you're saying that the page in question is showing up as #1 for every serch term)!

index.php or index.html has no bearing (if - as you say - only one exists).

The priority settings in the sitemap are priority for spidering, not indexing (Google don't choose the most important page on your site to show at the top of your listings anyway, they choose the one they deem most relevant to the search term); so my guess is you won't see any effect at all from that action.

There is some kind of problem setting up the 301 redirect, once the new domain appeared I thought it wouldn't be too much of a problem anyway as I have got most of the links on other sites pointing to the new domain.

Google doesn't even appear to have indexed the index page, so I'm hoping the sitemap would help it find it (althoguh I don't understand why it didn't do it int he first place), would this be the case if it has not indeaxed the page?

The other page that comes up has a few links but nothing compared to the homepage, the word I am searching for is actually just the company name, even searching for www.domain.com brings up the other page.

IT is a massive problem here, they have a massive backlog of work and they only really have one guy that understands anything about SEO so getting the 301 done won't be easy.

Do you think Google will just sort this out eventually?

It does seem very much like you need to get the 302 removed and turned into a 301 redirect.

Hard to tell for sure without knowing the domain names.

If the webserver is Apache you could potentially do it yourself if you have ftp access to the server to update the website, you could add a .htaccess file to do the 301's and thus get round the IT department backlog.