danny - 7:55 am on Jun 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

It's just plain right, as your own site shows. For starters, your home page links go to http://example.com/index.html and not http://example.com/

Google understands index.html files, as does every other major search engine. I believe Google has stated that explicitly, but I've never seen duplicate index.html/non-index.html versions for a site that wasn't doing something weird with meta refreshes or javascript redirects or mod_rewrite.

In any event, the links on my site have been like that for ten years and that's never caused a problem. I think as an explanation for a 95% drop in Google referrals this is even less plausible than my wild AdSense/ODP speculations.