Should I 301 Redirect The index.html Page?

[umtmedia]

Hello,

As an experiment I am trying to work with an SBI site but am noticing index.html is being forced on me as the homepage.

As I understand it's good practice to 301 redirect the index.html page to the to the actual home page. Can someone please confirm that I am right in thinking this?

Here is an example:

http://www.anguilla-beaches.com/index.html
http://www.anguilla-beaches.com/

According to yahoo 773 links are pointing to the index.html page and 771 links are pointing to the / page.

I'm sure Google knows that these are the same pages and does not consider them as duplicate but surely the index.html page should be redirected right? am I going mad here?

Now if we look at this site:

http://www.jugglenow.com the homepage has 198 links according to yahoo
http://www.jugglenow.com/index.html this page also has 198 links? now I am confused, are these 2 the same page?

On this page:

http://www.jugglenow.com/juggling-balls.html notice how there is no link to the actual homepage but there is a link to the index.html page.

Am I missing something here because I can't figure it out, surely there should be just 1 homepage without a index.html page.

Any help would be appreciated

[AlanMosley]

Go ahead nad 301, SE see it as a canonical as index,html is not always the default page. make sure you dont have any internal links point t the .html, of you will leak link juice though the 301 un-necessary.

doing a 301 should consolidate you link juice.

[RyanKent]

The most important factor is to ensure only one URL is available for each page. You should not present the same page through both the /index.html and / URLs. Pick one.

My strong preference is to use the simple / URL as "index.html" does not offer any value to users nor search engines. It just makes the URL longer and more cluttered.

I'm sure Google knows that these are the same pages and does not consider them as duplicate ...

Not true. On your site you may choose to offer the same content via /index.html and /, but another site could choose to present completely different content on those pages. You are offering two unique URLs, your content is duplicated and that can cause multiple issues. Duplicate content is an issue and a division of your links is another issue.

The simple fix is to design your site from the beginning to only offer a / page and not a index.html page. If you have an existing site where this is an issue, use the 301 redirect to fix the problem.