Is it ok to redirect the home page to internal page?

"index" is not our home page

[eclancy]

We have a new site that was designed with a flash page for the index page and all other pages are php. Today we decided for SEO reasons to remove the Flash home page, (it had no words to be indexed).

Since all of the internal navigation points to a page we called main.php, we created an index.php which redirects to main.php

My understanding is that Google doesn't like redirects, and I am curious whether we will be penalized for the redirect. If so, we'll need to spend the time to change all of the navigation that now points to the home page as main.php, and change it to index.php.

Should we change our navigation or is this type of redirect acceptable?

[marcs]

Try this. Remove the index.php file and create a .htaccess file with this line :

DirectoryIndex main.php

That should tell Apache to use main.php as the "index" page.

[hutcheson]

The kind of redirect you are talking about will not be a problem with Google. In fact, "directory URLs" _always_ redirects in this way. It is not a spam practice, and can hardly be used for spamming.