.com/index.html and .com/ are both in G database

G has kinda forced me into a possible DupCon

[Mike McKnight]

back whenever it was that google got famous I like everyone else in web business submitted my site to G and did so several times not being sure the bot would visit again after changes made to pages. So years ago I had no idea it would someday be a penalty to submit example.com www.example.com and www.example.com/index.html

Two days ago I had a smart idea to rename homepage to home.html and submit www.example.com/index.html to removal tool. Got message on G yesterday permission denied. So in essence a forced possible duplicate content penalty.
They won't let me correct a 6 year old mistake. Who knew? In the past 45 days or so especially after the 24th of March my traffic and sales have disappeared. I'm just too dumb to figure out what has happened. I get less than 100 uniques from MSN and Y! I used to get 800 to 1000 from G and now down to 1/3 that. I have never emploied black hat anything to game SEs, I need to hire an expert to figure out what to do, if anyone can recommend a good honest pro please sticky me, and I'd be forever grateful, Mike

[edited by: ciml at 3:22 pm (utc) on April 1, 2005]
[edit reason] Examplified [/edit]

[diamondgrl]

Just 301 the /index.html to the / URL.

[Wizard]

Don't use removal tool in this case! Putting www.domain.com/index.html to urlconsole may remove also domain.com/ and www.domain.com/. The same with www and non-www: removing one of them causes the other to be removed from the index. For 6 months at least.

Use 301 redirect, however redirecting from /index.html to / sometimes makes infinite redirect loops, so make it carefully.

[taps]

had the same problem with / and /welcome.php. Just renamed welcome.php to index.php and changed DirectoryIndex in .htaccess.

Before that I made sure that all links to my index page are going to /.

With the renamed file it is no problem to redirect /welcome.php to / using a 301. So any inbound link pointing to /welcome.php will be redirected correctly.

[steveb]

I don't get what the problem is. Making a pointless home.html is silly at best and suicidal at worst.

[Mike McKnight]

Thanks to all replies, finally got a pro from WebmasterWorld to
make a clean 301 to fix this problem.