It's been established that search engines like Google treat www.widgets.com and www.widgets.com/index.html differently. Assuming that index.html is used as the default page for www.widgets.com (via the default DirectoryIndex config in Apache, or default setting in IIS, etc), there's an apparent duplicate content for the 2 "different" URLs, that is, www.widgets.com vis-a-vis www.widgets.com/index.html. But it's obvious that Google does not impose a duplicate content penalty in such cases. My question: what if we change the default page to be xyz.html? When Google spiders the site, is it smart enough to know that xyz.html is the default page and hence not impose a duplicate content penalty? E.g. for Apache, if I add the following line in .htaccess: DirectoryIndex xyz.html then www.widgets.com and www.widgets.com/xyz.html will look exactly the same. Will Google penalize this site?
My question - why bother changing the filename of the default page? I'm sure SE's recognize the common default page names (to avoid any duplicate content penalty): default index admin (from the old school days) So, if you are concerned about being penalized for duplicate content, I wouldn't risk it. Is there some specific reason for the default name change? Are you trying to sneak another keyword into the URL?
I don't get the logic behind using a different name for a "default" page. MS already has things messed up with default.*. I prefer the index.*. There have been times when we've designed websites for customers only to find out that the web host doesn't allow you to change the default document name and it has been fixed to default.* I suggest you stick to the conventions unless you have a pretty good reason...