Halfdeck - 4:36 am on Jan 11, 2008 (gmt 0)

"I am not sure if I am with you on that point g1smd. The fact that Google returns / for a homepage that is index.htm, shouldn't it indicate that Google has merged index.htm into /?"

Google may do some of the housecleaning for you, but you are still "wasting" link juice. Whether that's an insignificant or a major issue depends on the site.

For example, if you disallow duplicate content URLs using robots.txt, that still doesn't prevent those URLs from accumulating PageRank even if those URLs no longer show up in search results.