homepage/ and homepage/home.php have different PR

[voltrader]

My website traffic dropped quite a bit during the last update. I just noticed today that website/ and website/home.php have PR4 and PR3 respectively.

Could this be considered two homepages and thus be penalized?

[Stefan]

Yep. You should never serve up the same page to bots with different URL's. It confuses them, especially G. Having those two different PR's is a warning sign. G evidently sees them as separate pages.

[DorianWeb]

Is there a better way to tell if your site is penalized besides searching for "www.mydomain.com" (in quotes) and seeing if your site is listed first?

Thanks.

[voltrader]

Yep. You should never serve up the same page to bots with different URL's. It confuses them, especially G. Having those two different PR's is a warning sign. G evidently sees them as separate pages.

What would be the most efficient way to fix this?

A 301 from 'site.com/home.php' to 'site.com/'?

[voltrader]

Figured it out:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Stefan]

Well done :-)

Hope it works out.

[quotations]

So, if I want to direct

index.php
index.htm
index.html

all to /

this should work?

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ [%{HTTP_HOST}...] [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ [%{HTTP_HOST}...] [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.htm\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.htm$ [%{HTTP_HOST}...] [R=301,L]

Any downside to doing that?