A long, long time ago (early 90s) I came to believe that one should have multiple "index" pages (i.e. index.html, default.html, etc.).

I think that this had something do do with what Netscape Navigator would look for vs IE and/or what different servers would default to.

Now I am wondering about the duplicate content and canonicalization ramifications of having more than one "index" page.

Is there any reason now to have more than one "index" page, and if not, what should that one page be named for a HTML based site?

Thanks!

__________________
Sincerely,

Ted Amenta
Breckenridge Real Estate Broker

Hi,

My position on this started to change a couple of years ago.

Until about 2007 I used to see new clients with;
www.example.com/ = PR4
www.example.com/index.php = PR 2

and I advised them, as any SEO would have, to rather point "home" to the root ie "/" than to "/index.php" to help focus homepage link weight, and to avoid duplicate content of the homepage.

Google have got much better at handling homepages though and it's been years since I saw a PR split such as above.

I still advise people not to point the home page to /index.php though, but that's to make the site more future-proof. They might decide one day (God forbid!) to have a root pointing to /default.aspx and they would lose a lot of link weight from their natural backlinks.

So my advice would be to use navigational links that a) make home point to "/" or more importantly b) use "/dir/ rather than /dir/index.php. Both will make your site more future proof and there's still a duplicate content problem for case (b).

Cheers,
Paz.

__________________
10.3 million entries for Hotels in Turkey but I'm still chipping away.

Thanks, I have been pointing both internal and off-site links to "../" for years.

Right now I have index pages of index.htm, index.html, and default.htm

It would seem that when I go to "../", what loads is the default.htm page and I was going to get rid of the other two. But I thought I would ask around to see if there is any reason to keep them first.

__________________
Sincerely,

Ted Amenta
Breckenridge Real Estate Broker

Hi Ted,

Most servers will look for a "default" page when you link to "/" or "../" for example. I don't remember the priority but let's say they look for a index.htm and if that doesn't work maybe next a index.html, then an index.php etc. - unless you specify your default page at a server level.

My first thought would be that I would never "get rid of" an existing or historical /index.html page, even if my default was /index.htm because someone (years before you took over the website) linked to /index.html and those links would be lost to a "not found" page.

In your case I would delete the index.htm and index.html pages and set up the server to redirect these pages to "/" or "../" and set the server up to supply the content on "default.htm" whenever someone tried to open "/".

Cheers,
Paz.

__________________
10.3 million entries for Hotels in Turkey but I'm still chipping away.

Thanks Paz, I will not delete the index.htm or .html pages without giving it some more consideration.

With GoDaddy at least, it seems that the "default.xxx" page has priority over the "index.xxx" pages and this is true for IE, FireFox, Crome, Opera, and Safari.

__________________
Sincerely,

Ted Amenta
Breckenridge Real Estate Broker

Hi Ted,

Well I wouldn't prioritise for Godaddy so much as Google and Google are using modified Firefox browsers to crawl the web. The nice thing about serving up a "homepage" of "/" (at a server level) is that none of them will be able to see if you are using default.xxx or index.xxxx - the end result will be your homepage.

Cheers,
Paz.

__________________
10.3 million entries for Hotels in Turkey but I'm still chipping away.