Do I need to 301 redirect www.domain.com/index.html to www.domain.com/ ?

[Small_Business_SEO]

So, interestingly enough, the Moz crawler picked up my index.html file (homepage) and reported duplicate content, of course. But, Google hasn't seemed to index the www.domain.com/index.html version of my homepage, just the www.domain.com version. However, it looks like I do have links going specifically to www.domain.com/index.html and I want to make sure those are getting counted towards my overall domain strength.

Is it necessary to 301 redirect in the scenario described above?

[Yannis_s]

Hi,

I tested the code mentioned above:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.(html|php)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

It works well for index.php, but not for XX-index.php. The site where I tested this code is bilingual, so there is also a GR-index.php file and the above code redirects it to the root domain as well.

Also, another problem is that the code above causes the redirection of index.php inside any directory. For example, http://domain.com/directory/index.php is redirected to http://domain.com/directory/

How can I avoid this and keep only a "basic" redirection of http://domain.com/index.php to http://domain.com?

Yannis

[MindlessWizard]

I would recommend you to do that.  Homepage may have different versions  depending on the CMS you are using.

index.htm index.html

index.php

So as @donford mentioned you can fix that with .htaccess

[donford]

Yep,

This code inside your .htaccess file should fix that.

``RewriteEngine On 
RewriteBase /` RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.(html|php)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]`

Hope it helps,
Don

[TheeDigital]

Yes, you will want to redirect it. Be careful though as a lot of times this isn't done correctly and creates a loop. There are multiple ways to do this including but not limited to DirectoryIndex or a RewriteRule