Apache re-directs to non 'index' default page

Does Google understand

[sparticus]

We recently changed one of our websites so that when you type in the URL the web server (Apache) serves you a page called news.jsp instead of the typical 'index.htm' page (so there are now no 'index' or 'default' pages in the site).

We used to be number one and two for our main keyword, (which wasn't competitive at all) and now that Google seems to have picked up the new site we've dropped way back to 20 for this news.jsp page (the news.jsp page is still optimised really well for the keyword). However, Google still has the index.html page from the old site in it's cache, is this causing the problem?

What's more puzzling is that our URL still has a Page Rank of 5, but the new .jsp pages show up in Google's cache even though they have a PR of 0, but they have been indexed.

I can't figure out what to make of it. Will we get back to number one after the next Google dance? It's a bit of a complex problem, but any ideas?

[jatar_k]

does it do an actual redirect or have you added it to the DirectoryIndex Directive?

If it redirects, why? Why not just change the name to index.jsp and leave it like that?