Robert_Charlton - 5:22 pm on May 3, 2007 (gmt 0)

Make index.html as the canonical one...

In my experience, links to your site (ie, to the default canonical) are going to tend to be in the form www.example.com/ no matter what you do, so you are creating a problem by making index.html your canonical.

...So, if you don't know what you're doing, redirecting files back to root could cause loops and additional problems. IMO, the simplest, fastest and most secure way is to set default root file and exclude it in robots.txt.

Agreed that the redirection, as well as the setup of the default root file, most definitely needs to be done by someone who knows what he or she is doing. When I get to index.html rewrites, I have someone else set up the server and do the rewrites for me.

But setting up a default root file, of, say, index.html, continuing to link to it and excluding it in robots.txt, IMO, is going to continue to split your PageRank and isn't going to cure your display problem... and it encourages potential links to the index.html form, further complicating the PageRank split.