www.xyz.com same as www.xyz.com/index.html?

[phillypleez]

This has been bugging me all day...

My question is, do search engines consider these 2 different pages? Furthermore lets says I'm getting incoming links to the www.xyz.com from 10 different sites and and incoming links to www.xyz.com/index.html from 10 other sites. Do they divide up the value of the links?

[Span]

Yes, / and index.html could be considered two different pages. Here's an eight pages thread about a homepage that disappeared from Google: [webmasterworld.com ]

[phillypleez]

When you go to my new site it automatically goes to www.xyz.com/index.html

Is this a bad idea? Should I tell my programmer that we need it to go to www.xyz.com

(there are some programming in the site and he said it was a lot easier to have it as /index.html)

[pageoneresults]

(There are some programming in the site and he said it was a lot easier to have it as /index.html)

If he said it was easier that way, let him have his way. Then, when you decide to change the underlying technology of your site from .html to .asp or .php, he can be the one that backtracks everyone who linked to the site that way and have them update their URI references. :)

If linking to the root of your web, this would be best practice...

[example.com...]

Include the trailing forward slash. When linking to root level pages at the sub-directory level, this would be best practice...

[example.com...]

Include the trailing forward slash. Keep it simple.