URL Googlebot type Status Date submitted
www.example.com;/ Web Success 9/22/10 2:18 PM
www.example.com/index.htm - Web Not found 9/22/10 2:18 PM
www.example.com - Web Success 9/17/10 12:02 PM
Its sayin index. htm not found?
whats the difference?
Not sure which of the above were due to typos here and which may have been due to typos or errors in your coding.
The "difference" is that for search engines you should have one and only one "canonical" or standard url for your home page. Most servers are set up to return your home page for several different urls, with and without the www, and with and without index.html.
When search engines see a page under different urls, though, they consider the variants to be duplicate content. Google generally choose the urls with the highest PageRank and filters the rest from its serps pages. At best, this results in a split link vote for your page.
We've had many, many discussions on duplicate content and the problems of canonicalization errors. I suggest you do some reading. Take a look at the
Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com] section, pinned to the top of the Google SEO forum home page, and look at the Duplicate Content section and in particular the Canonical Issues section. From your description, it appears that these two posts might be most applicable....
Canonical URL Issues [webmasterworld.com]
- many ways to introduce duplicates Domain Root vs. index.html [webmasterworld.com]
- yet another kind of duplicate Also, look at this good introduction by Matt Cutts....
SEO advice: url canonicalization [
mattcutts.com...]
