The last part redirects index.html to /

There would only be a loop if you redirected / to index.html

99.9% sure this'll work for you I'm using the exact code on a small site right now and it's working fine

Well, I would recommend you alter the internal links to just point to the new '/' default, but in the meantime...

I would have thought your code would have worked, but every time I try it my site falls over. It might work for you though. Give it a try but test it straight away

I'll see if I can get a different version working on my test site for you if not

Sounds fine. You could also go into webmaster tools as well and tell them to ignore the 'tab' parameter

Site Configuration > Settings > Parameter Handling

Although if you're changing it to # you shouldn't need to

Depends how competitive, but around 3 days if you're lucky and the search matches

Usually I only see our stories in there for 1 or 2 days tops, but then again smaller and smaller sites run with the story and our results get replaced with the same story but more recent updates.

If you become the authority on that story (ie, lots of links and references) I would imagine you could stay in there for longer, but alas, never seen it.

Hmm, I've not tested conclusively but I can't think how a comma would adversely effect you. However, anecdotally, I've seen lots of sites move away from commas and pipes in titles so I'd have to assume that something was up.

I don't think stop words are being treated the same as the used to be with Google trying to figure out intent more and more, plus I'm not a huge fan of special characters (not that a comma is that special) in the title so unless it looked ridiculous I'd consider not using it.

I see.

Well, I certainly used to put a few keywords in titles using commas assuming it acted as a separator, however (and again anecdotally) I now write (as does everybody I'm comparing myself to) titles in the format "Cheap Books and Free Books".

Stick 'poker' into Google and look at everybody's titles. A few years back that would have looked like 'Poker, Online Poker, Texas Holdem | PokerSite" where as now it's "Poker and Online Poker including Texas Holdem at PokerSite".

However, stick 'travel' into Google and you'll see everybody still using commas.

So, as I say, I can't think how it would adversely effect you but I think with Google trying to extract meaning from people's searches that, in the long term, more natural sentences over a list of keywords would serve you better.

Ha ha, maybe

I think it's something infinitely less planned out and they simply rushed this change out the door without understanding fully what it would do to the SERPs.

Although I do think you're right that in a few months (in what will be claimed to be a second Panda sweep) that things will go back and only the very worst offenders will stay penalised.

Yeah, if it doesn't work you'll probably be faced with a blank page or you may get a 500 server error or maybe a 310. It should be obvious pretty fast

You want to track individual pdfs?

Off the top of my head adding ="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/spoofpage')>anchor text will spoof a page view to your spoofpage in analytics.

That will require individually tagging each pdf though.

Let me have a think if there's anyway to change the 'spoofpage' to the href 'url' to allow you to add the same code to each.

Hmm, maybe, I doubt the index.php is doing anything as if there's a index.html and index.php the .html takes precedence.

Check what's in the .php file, might be easier just to delete it.