Shawn, thank you for that info. If I understand, with an .htaccess file we could allow people to see a list of all the documents in the folder, and the names would be clickable, which creates the links that Google needs in order to index our documents. (The reason the documents don't have any links is that they are contracts, still in .doc or .pdf format, not html files. There are way too many of them to convert and add links. We think they should get indexed by Google because that folder is pointed to in our custom search function.)
The actual page is http://www.ibew1245.com/PGEcontractLibrary.html
I have used "Google Custom Search" to point the first search box to a folder of documents, and it works. (For example, search for "hard hat" and you get 3 documents in results.)
But the second search box is not finding any of the pdf documents in the folder I pointed it to. (I know the pdfs are searchable, and the path is correct.)
So to use your idea, I could create an .htaccess file and upload that to the contracts folder, then add a link on my page that says "complete list of contracts" with the URL to the access file, and they would get a simple directory, like your example. This would at least give access to the documents and the list would always be current.
What do you think?
Kathy