Default index.htm pages

Does multiple index.htm pages hurt a site?

[pheobe97]

I developed a rather large site for a non-profit organization. I have done several other large sites as well.

There is one main index.htm in the root folder, and we also have sub directories that we marketing directly, for example www.mysite.com/2005 which has another index.htmfile. We also publish a newsletter, and the newsletters each have their own index.htm file for easy reference www.mysite.com/newsletters/spring05

Our IT master has requested that there not only be one index.htm file in the root folder (there is), but one index.htm or any default html naming convention for the entire website. He claims this effects search engine rankings and hackers.

We come up extremely well in search engines. Only allowing one default html page for the entire site seems ridiculous and uncessary to me. From a marketing standpoint, it will be a nightmare, for obvious reasons.

Can anyone point me to proof that this will harm our site, or point me to proof that it will not.

I tried a search and haven't found exactly what I was looking for.

Thanks!

[encyclo]

Welcome to the forums pheobe97! I'm not sure what exactly your IT master is requesting. Is he requesting that there should be no subdirectories as you have them at the moment (and that everything should go in to the root directory), or is it something else? I can't see anything particularly wrong with your site structure as described.

[cuce]

I've seen people do this before, just adding index pages in every directory. i guess that way people can't view your directory that way if they type for example [root.com...]
As far as I know you can stop that by changing settings on the server...but I'm no hacker, and maybe index.html files in every directory is the only truly safe method.

As far as having any advantage in search engines, that sounds fishy to me. I imagine such pages would have no content and they would not be linked to... I don't imagine the search engines would even care(but I'm not an seo guy).