Our website: www.membercard.com, is the first google listing on the
search word "membercard" (we are very proud of this).  However, that
first listing (listed as "Member Benefits, Inc., our company) links to
an internal page rather than our homepage.  Why is this and can it be
changed to the home page?   Thanks, 
Jonathan Sack

Before I begin with my advices, please let me clarify, that Google
Answers Researchers are not Google Employees. Researchers have vast
knowledge on this and other issues (and have been carefully selected
by Google), but do not represent Google nor do they have any "inside
knowledge" about Google's policies.



Jsmbi,

Congrats on your #1 Google listing. getting the URL changed is a
pretty simple process according to the Google website, though it can
take a bit of time...Here's what the www.Google.com website has to say
about it

Change the URL of your website

Since Google's crawler associates the content of a page with its URL,
there is no way to manually change the URL that is displayed for your
website. The URL will be updated the next time we crawl your site. The
crawler revisits each site according to an automatic schedule, and we
cannot manually accelerate the date on which your site will be
recrawled.

If the URL of your website has changed since we last crawled it, you
may use the URL submission form and the URL removal methods described
below. However, the URL submission form does not take effect
immediately, so using the URL removal feature may leave your website
inaccessible from Google until we crawl your site again.

Instead of requesting a change from Google, we recommend that you ask
the sites currently linked to your old site to update their links (to
point to your new site). Also, don't forget to change any entries you
may have in the Yahoo! directory and the Open Directory. Finally, if
your old URLs redirect to your new site using HTTP 301 (permanent)
redirects, our crawler will know to use the new URL. Changes made in
this way will take 6-8 weeks to be reflected in Google.


This is a link to the URL submission form they mention
://www.google.com/addurl.html
Here is the link that is hyperlinked inside that text on the words
"HTTP 301 (permanent) redirects"
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt

This information was found here
://www.google.com/remove.html#change_url

I got there from Google's "About" page
"Submitting your Site How Google adds URLs..."
://www.google.com/about.html

So, there you go, given about 6 to 8 weens, and a form or 2, you can
most likely get it to reference the main page, not an internal one.

If this answer requires further explanation, please request
clarification before rating it, and I'll be happy to look into this
further."
Thanks for using Google!
Nenna-GA
Google Answers Researcher

---

Clarification of Answer by nenna-ga on 21 Apr 2004 15:05 PDT

Hello again,

Also, if you would like it to leave out internal sections of your
website, you can learn how to have that happen here
://www.google.com/remove.html#exclude_website

Also, this may be of interest
 I'm changing my URL. How can I maintain my rank?

    Regrettably, we cannot manually change your listed address at the
same time you move to your new site.

    That said, there are steps you can take to make sure your
transition is a smooth one. Google listings are based in part on our
ability to find you from links on other sites. To preserve your rank,
you will want to inform others who link to you of your change of
address. One way to find out who is linking to you is to try a link
search. Enter "link:[your full URL]" into the Google search box. You
may not find every page that links to you with this method, but it
should help you begin redirecting the links leading to your site.
(Please note: we do not serve link queries for all of the sites in our
index, so this may not produce any results for your site.) Once your
new site is live, you may wish to place a permanent redirect (using a
"301" code in HTTP headers) on your old site to inform visitors and
search engines that your site has moved.

    Finally, if your site goes unlisted for a time, this does not mean
you were dropped from our index. Sometimes, in these transitions, we
will fail to find a site at its new address. Just be sure that others
are linking to you and we should pick you up on our next web crawl.

And, some information in the "GoogleBot" and how a site is found,
linked to, and referenced. This may explain how it got an internal
page instead of your main one.
://www.google.com/webmasters/3.html#B3

Nenna-GA