I am a novice web master and I have a difficult situation that I am not sure how to resolve, and I could use some sage advice. When my site was first designed many years ago, the home page was designed as (index.asp). When people typed in the URL, it would hesitate before resolving to the (index.asp) page, so I added a (default.asp) page, so every search for my URL resolves there, unless someone specifically types in the (index.asp) extension. I have had both pages on my site for years, and search engines seemed to index them both. As of the latest Google update, I have lost ranking from my primary keyword. When I searched the ALLINS, my (default.asp) page is ranking high (1 or 2) in most of the ALLINS, but my (index.asp) page is ranking much lower. It appears from several webmaster tools that I have checked, that Google is counting the (index.asp) page and it's ALLIN rank, not the (default.asp) page. I have now removed the (index.asp) page from my site and plan on waiting until the next Google crawl, hoping Google will drop the (index.asp) page. Was this the correct thing to do? I would really appreciate any advice that anyone might have.
It's a classic cannonical problem. I'd also use the Google tool to remove the page altogether (and make sure it's showing a 404 when submitting to the Google removal tool). Warning: Using the removal tool for any other page wouldn't be anything to worry about. But on an index.asp/htm/html you could lose your entire site if that's the page Google has internally marked as your "main" page.
Why not use a 301 (permanent) redirect from index.asp to default.asp? I'm not sure how to do this on a Windows server but I presume your host can tell you how to go about it.
If it's IIS most hosts are a pain and will quote security risks to get out of doing it. However, it can be done via ISAPI-rewrite.