Old pages, are they still being indexed?

Hi folks,

I was just looking at my site via ftp and realized I have a lot of pages on my server that aren't linked anywhere. Different pages that I never linked to because maybe I never used them or went with a different look during the design process..what ever.. My question is will these pages be indexed?

I have a bunch of pages that I wouldn't want being seen as I have been working hard to optimize the pages I currently have live. I'm just not sure. It would make sense to me that these pages aren't being indexed because they are not linked to, but I am not sure how the different spiders work when it comes to crawling a site.

I just did an orphan search with a utility I found online and it came back with a bunch of pages I created when I was originally developing my site. That's why I was asking.

There are two ways they could be indexed; if you had them live at any time and they were crawled search engines know they exist and might crawl them periodicly even if you no longer link to them. This happened to a few sites I know of, back when florida hit, and they stopped linking to their "link.html" pages but didn't take them off the server.

Second, and less likely is a way through referals that frankly I don't totally understand, but there's a post here about it.

-Greg

They can be indexed if they used to live. Just do a 301 redirect on your old pages to your homepage and they will be out of the index in a month or so.

Google has said they can find orphan pages so if you really dont want them to be found do the redirect.

Actually this site was indexed while I was building it as there was a site that was up before the one I created. I'm thinking I should take those down. In the meantime I will set up redirects for those pages.

Thanks for the input guys.

I'm having some probs setting up this 301 redirect. It seems easy enough, but it doesn't appear to do what it is intended to. It's not redirecting..Rather the same orphan pages are showing up. This is my first time setting up an .htaccess file. I'm not sure if I am doing it right.

here is my code --> redirect 301 asd.htm http://www.realgreen.com/index.htm

I found a tute here for this http://www.tamingthebeast.net/artic...01-redirect.htm

It looks easy enough, but it doesn't appear to be working yet.

try:

redirect 301 /asd.htm http://www.realgreen.com/index.htm

Make sure the .htaccess has no extension on it as most progrs like notepad add one.