MSN has both .com and index.html

[Sabat]

Hoping someone can help me. MSN has both the .com and index.html version of my home page listed in their index. I understand that this can lead to duplicate content issues. I contacted my server and he says that I can't use any of the url code re-writes because I am not on a dedicated server.

I would like to get this fixed but don't know how.

Any suggestions.

Thanks.

[incrediblehelp]

On you on Apache? Then you should be able to do it the htaccess file.

Hosters are a dime a dozen and ones like this that dont want to help you should not get your business.

[covingtonscustoms]

Maybe you could block the index.html in your robots.txt?

[Clint1]

I had the same issue with G. They were hitting on my index.html page in my logs, no other SE was doing this. I had to use this code:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.whateveryourdomainis.com/ [R=301,L]

This did a 301 redirect from index.html to my domain. If your site is hosted on Apache and you have .htaccess file access, you can simply add that line of code in it. It has nothing to do with being on a dedicated server or not.

[Jason (Expletia)]

Have you checked if your sitemaps duplicate eg "index.html should not be included"

<url>
<loc>http://www.expletia.co.uk/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.expletia.co.uk/index.html</loc>
<lastmod>2007-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>

Contrary to most MSN does read sitemaps but you have to wait for it to be found, to speed it up you can include temp links on your main pages

MSN States:
http://help.live.com/help.aspx?project=wl_webmasters
left menu, open
How can I make sure my website is correctly indexed?
open
Content guidelines for your website

Quote" "Add a site map. A site map helps MSNBot to find all of your pages"

To alleviate your prob i would included Sitemaps:
ror.xml "independant"
sitemap.xml "Google"
sitemap.txt "Yahoo"
sitemap.html "max 100 links, otherwise spamming"