Why google shows /home.htm as the index file? does it hurt my seo?

Hi,

If you google "Chatsworth Lodge", my website ranks second,

Chatsworth Lodge No. 9053 in Eastbourne - East Sussex - Chatsworth ...
 - 16 Sep
6 Sep 2008 ... Chatsworth Lodge No. 9053 - Masonic Lodge in Eastbourne, East Sussex.
chatsworthlodge.org.uk/home.html - 17k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

Code (markup):

I don't know why google shows the home.html file, the website http://chatsworthlodge.org.uk/ has PR 2, but http://chatsworthlodge.org.uk/home.html has PR N/A

Does anyone know the reason or ways to exclude the home.html file from being indexed or how to change it to the main site?

Thanks in advance.

 

I would change home.html to index.html then when you post links post just http://chatsworthlodge.org.uk/

All browsers will automatically see index.html this should fix you up. Make sure that you don't have a lot of links pointing to home.html because if you change it to index.html you will have non working links and you can get a rank decrease. What I do is make sure the only html file in the main dir is index.html then I have the other pages go to folders so I can be more organized.

 

It's a joomla website so it's a bit different. I don't have actual home.htm file, it's Joomla generating a file like this, but it doesn't happen on other websites.

 

Bcoz the keywords matching.
Maybe the home.htm matches better with the keywords you search.
I believe it doesn't have any negative effect.

 

No wonder it shows the home.htm page as indexed. You are however linking to that page from several parts of your site so Google gives more credit to that page instead of the direct domain URL. Try to change the interlinking and link to the direct domain instead of to the home.htm page this way you will also avoid duplicate content too.

 

Use a 301 redirect.

Direct http://chatsworthlodge.org.uk/home.html to http://chatsworthlodge.org.uk/

 

Any idea how?

Can I use my .htaccess file to do that?

 

Yes, you put it in your htaccess file. Depends on what type of server setup you have as to what goes in the htaccess file. If you google it you will find one you can copy and just change the domains.

 

Thanks a lot, googled for it and found a solution, took me some time but I got there in the end

 

Using a redirect and using a index.html is better I think. You can use a htaccess file for the links ponting to home.html