I wondering about the duplicate content filters and how they process websites with index pages having filenames other then index.html/index.php etc. Say I have my DirectoryIndex set to keyword-rich-title.html via .htaccess. When crawling the SE's first go to http://www.website.tld and webserver spits out indexpage as set by DirectoryIndex. Will the SE's consider it dupe content if within the site you link to your homepage as /keyword-rich-title.html? Do they think that this is a dupe of index.html (i.e. the page they see at http://www.website.tld/)? I have seen some SEO'd sites where they place an absolute link to http://www.website.tld/keyword-rich-title.html anchored on the keyword-rich-title.html page itself. Does this help identify to the SE's that there is no index.html? Any comments appreciated in advance.
my mambo site has /homepage as a duplicate of the www.mysite.com but i don't really think it has a adverse affect on my rankings
If you set a 301 redirect to the new page, it should be fine.. I mean the index.html should 301 to the page you would like to..
Thanks for the replies. So a 301 would be a wise move then? Has anyone actually observed (or been able to observe) a dupe content issue with renamed index pages?
well.. i got /keyword-phrase/index.html almost always in the supplemental results because /keyword-phrase/ is also indexed. this doesn't really matter as long as you don't spam your way into the serps and have thousands of pages in the supplemental index