The code should definitely go into the websites root directory's .htaccess, however .htaccess can be weird, a few days ago I ran into a similar issue with a client's website, and I was able to remedy the issue with a variation of the code.

index Redirect RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)index.(php|html|htm|asp)\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/))index.(php|html|htm|asp)$ http://yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you give me the URL for the site I will take a look at it and let you know what would be feasible.

@Dan

Thanks for your reply.  It seems like there are lots of different ways to solve this problem.  I just watched this video on Matt Cutt's blog where he discusses his preference for 301 redirects over rel canonical tag.

Where would you say your solution fits in?

sorry about the delay of this response, i didn't realize the that you were asking me a question right away. When placing the code I provided in my previous answer this will cause a 301 perminant redirect to the original URL. That's actually what the

[R=301,L]

portion of the code is stating (R) redirect (301) status is referring to. After reviewing the Matt Cutts video, I realize that I should have asked you if you were operating on a Linux server  that you had root access to. We actually utilize both redirects and canonical tags since it was recommended by the on-page optimization reports. Heck Google uses them, I would assume because it's easier for the user to be referred to a single page URL. Obviously though if you don't have server header access, and are not familiar with .htaccess (you can accidentally break your site) then the canonical solution is appropriate

Odd enough I just recently answered this question. The SEOmoz crawler is correct, because without a redirect you will be able to access both versions of the page in your browser.

www.yoursite.com/

www.yoursite.com/index.html

To resolve this issue simply rewrite the index.html to the root url by placing the following code into your .htaccess file into your root directory.

Options +FollowSymlinks                                                                                                            RewriteEngine on

Index Rewrite                                                                                                                                RewriteRule ^index.(htm|html|php) http://www.yoursite.com/ [R=301,L]                                      RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.(htm|html|php) http://www.yoursite.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

You can also do the same with the index file in any subdirectories that you might create, by simply placing a .htaccess into those sub directories and using variations of the above code. This is how you create nice tight URLs without the duplicate content issue that look like - http://www.semclix.com/design/business/

Here's the .htaccess rewrite command that you can use for the index.html redirect -

Options +FollowSymlinks                                                                                                   RewriteEngine on

Index Rewrite                                                                                                                   RewriteRule ^index.(htm|html|php) http://www.amarasoftware.com/ [R=301,L]              RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.(htm|html|php) http://www.amarasoftware.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

We set  up our site to utilize a index redirect for all of our sub directories as well, so with this method you simply name your sub directories to match the url path that you desire. Each sub directory has it's own index which you redirect with a variation of the above code. By doing this you can have nice clean url paths like http://www.semclix.com/design/ecommerce/ - and mitigate the duplicate content issue. We hope that this helps.