The url http://www.example.com/ and http://www.example.com/index.html both display the same web page. But search engine treats them as 2 different urls. Hence there is a split in the page rank and affects SEO.
Possible solutions I got after web search:
1.Use DirectoryIndex index.html in the .htaccess file.
This tells the search engine that http://www.example.com/ and http://www.example.com/index.html are same.
Issue I am facing: DirectoryIndex index.html in the .htaccess file expects that all sub-folders also have and index.html file. Ex. if there is a folder “blog” in the root directory which has no index.html file in it, then the url
“http://www.example.com/blog/” throws index not found error.
2.using 301 redirect. Redirect http://www.example.com/index.html to http://www.example.com/
Issue: redirections increase load time. It is not a good practice.
Please suggest which solution is better? I doubt if the 1st one is a solution or not.
Also, if I have to redirect, redirecting http://www.example.com/index.html to http://www.example.com/ is better or vice-versa with regard to SEO?
Just use canonical URLs. This will solve the problem easily. You could also do a 301 redirect from the index.html to the / if necessary as that would also accomplish the same thing.