htaccess Question

[brnm98105]

Hi, I'm fairly new to SP so please bear with me. I have a site which had a very high 1st page ranking on Google that slipped to the 7th page recently. I was told by someone that It may be caused by my site being recoginzed as 4 site due to the fact my site was coming up as mydomain,com , www, mydomain,com, www,mydomain,com/index,html and mydomain,com/index,html.

I recently inserted a 301 redirect to correct the main domain issue it looks like this and works

RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^mydomain,com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ [www(dot...] )mydomain,com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Question 1
Does this help me and if so what can I add to the HTACCESS do reference the index.html entries

Question 2
In Google Webmaster tools does it help to point my site to www,mydomain,com (which is where all my backlink building has been done)

Thanks in advance

[g1smd]

The index redirect goes first. See these posts for many examples.

[google.com...]

I never set the WMT preference. I always use the redirect as that signals the same for all users and all SE.