I was working on a website that ranked well for a very competitive keyword. The index page was www.domain.com/index.html. Recently, the site owner added a index page with the exact same content that is www.domain.com/index.php, which is now the main homepage. How can this affect the sites rankings. Recently, the rankings have dropped, but I thought it was because of the flux Google is in right now If all the links were built when the site was www.domain.com/index.html and now it has been changed to www.domain.com/index.php, do all the links go to waste? What should I do to save the rankings?
You can do a 302 redirect of all the old pages to the new page to preserve your rankings. Any other suggestion is no good
catanich is right. Never use a 302 redirect for that purpose. The best thing that you can do is to focus the home page on a single URL. You don't need to use index.html or index.php in your home page links. Just use http://www.yourdomainname.com/ in all links to the home page.
All the links do go to www.domain.com. However, the site owner added an additional homepage that is index.php. SO now there are nealry identical sites, one is www.domain.com/index.html and the other is www.domain.com/index.php. The new php page is the one that shows up in the SERPS now and it dropped from page 2 to page 30. I believe the old homepage (index.html) was the one ranking on the second page and now that the site owner added this additional homepage (index.php) Google is not giving the site the same link credit because of the new index.php. The .php page is now the new homepage. All the links where built when there was just one homepage: index.html Does that make sense?