Dilema on correcting index mistake

[jgmiller]

Our home page name is index.php and has been forever. I just discovered a configuration mistake that was later covered by an .htaccess entry. In our .htaccess file we do a permanent redirect from index.html to index.php.

That's all well and good and works fine however it's not technically correct. This works because index.php is listed last in our <DirectoryIndex> directive. in reality we should list index.php first and do a redirect from index.html to just [ourdomain...] which would preserve the correct URL.

So here's the dilema, it's easy enough to fix however we have very good rankings on all of the major engines and of course they have indexed index.php. If I fix this I know eventually the engines will index just [ourdomain.com...] however for a period of time index.php will also be in engine so technically that's duplicate content which might result in a penalty.

Any thoughts? Should I just leave well enough alone, right now all the engines seem to be very happy about the situation but I don't want to wake up one day and find it has changed.

Thanks

[Longhaired Genius]

There is good reason to believe that the search engines regard / and /index to be the same thing, so I wouldn't worry about any duplication issues.

I think you should redirect /index.html to / and make sure that every link that is under your control goes to / and not /index (that's what I've done, myself) and then don't worry about it.