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Ideally, you should avoid 301 redirect from index.php, as it will cause to go in infinite loop. I too have used 301 redirect earlier, but later applied a better way is Rel=canonical tag Still, if you look for 301 redirect - below is the code which will help redirecting :- RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.index.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ /$1 [R=301,L] May also see this url for all sort of redirection from html, php, non www page to www page http://www.gabblet.com/post/2011/09/27/301-redirect-for-index-non-www-to-www-using-htaccess.aspx Let know how it goes

Thanks for those valuable inputs Karl. @Blink-SEO Just a quick glance at the site's IP revealed that stevesims.com is hosted on a shared web server with an IP address 195.238.172.64 that has about 1,134 domains hosted on it. There are few porn and other bad sites sharing this IP address. Though there are different views in this regard and this might not be the cause of current rank drop, I recommend this site to be moved to a better host with a dedicated IP as I recommend to all my clients who are serious about their online business. Also Google PageSpeed test for this site says that the server response time is sub-optimal and the score is 48% where it should have been ideally above 80%. Please look out for detailed analysis at a site like, gtmetrix.com. Next, I would recommend you to visit, http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/ and check if (I am sure it is) this site is a victim of Penguin update and take it from there. You can then try bad link removal service like, http://www.removeem.com/ Hope this helps and good luck with your SEO audit. Best, Devanur Rafi.

This is a fantastic answer, thank you.

I've had a little look through the website and the link profile and everything seems ok from that end. None of the pages are set to 'noindex' and the robots.txt isn't blocking any of the search bots. Usually I would ask if there has been an unnatural links warning come through Webmaster Tools but there are only a few links pointing to the site (all of which go to the homepage), so I doubt this is the case. What I would recommend is that you start building some links to the deeper pages on the website - also, set up a blog or something similar and start placing some new pages on the website. Once you build some new content a little more reguarly, Google will start indexing the site more frequently. This should clear up the issue a lot quicker. I would put a bit more of a focus into building some deep links on the site though. Once you've done that I'm sure you will start seeing some results.