example.tld and example.tld/index.html treated as different pages

Canonical issue with a twist?

[DoingItWell]

I've noticed with some new websites that I get different pagerank values from the same page, depending on whether it's shown with the URL www.example.tld or www.example.tld/index.html - the pure domain one usually has the PR value eg. 3, while the index.html one has a value of 0.

Has this been around for long?

Should I be worried?

[tedster]

Yep -- this is definitely a potential issue and is discussed here quite often. See [webmasterworld.com...] for one of the longer discussions on the topic.

In the past (who knows right now) one of the versions got cached less and less often, and eventually went into the supplemental index. This doesn't mean that it's a good thing -- splitting PR and link influence between different urls and so on.

It is quite possible for a server to have many urls all pointing to the same "Home Page" -- it happens a lot. Search engines will try to reduce the number of listings if two pages are identical. So the best practice is to help them and help your site. Make sure only one url gets a 200 OK header for any given content -- and especially the Home Page. Have Home Page links point to the domain root, and 301 any other possible urls to the domain root.

[DoingItWell]

Thanks - I've been looking for a thread like that. So I need to 301 index.html to / and use / rather than index.html in internal links to get to the frontpage. How on Earth rookie websites ever get off the ground without WebmasterWorld help is a mystery to me. :-)

[DoingItWell]

This makes me wonder about Google Sitemaps - should I then simply remove the index.html page from the sitemap file, or remove the index.html part of the URL?