TLD and Index Page

confused

[vicky]

hi,

i am bit confused about TLD and index page. actually while optimizing the sites i cam across many sites having different PR for the same page i.e. http://www.example.com/ and http://www.example.com/index.html both having different PR.

so as a first i decided to point all the links pointing to the home page at http://www.example.com/. after this i did second thing which utterly confused me.actually i included Disallow: /index.html in the robots.txt file and set the index page at a very low pripority in the xml sitemap and high priority for TLD.have i done right thing?

[phranque]

that might cause more problems than it solves.

the correct thing to do is redirect (using a 301 response) http://www.example.com/index.html to http://www.example.com/ and configure your server to use index.html as the default display page for a directory.

[vicky]

yes i have already done this and as a further caution i have added Disallow: /index.html so that there is no way robots can find it.is it correct?

[phranque]

no.
if the robot isn't allowed to request the url it won't ever see the redirect.
therefore you can't control how the page is indexed.

it is better to allow the request and then properly redirect it to the canonical url.

[vicky]

yeah nice answer...thanks...may be you are right.hope this is the right way