Okay, so I have been pulling my hair out over the last few months trying to figure out why certain pages of my sites dropped in ranking and had their PageRank reduced down, down,down and now they sit as “unranked.”

Then yesterday when going through and looking at cache dates from one of my tools I noticed a pattern on a few dozen sites … the default page (index.html) of some sub folders was showing up twice, once with the file name and once with just the folder.

I then discovered on these occurences, I had mistakenly linked to these folders both ways. For example:

http://www.domain.com/product/

http://www.domain.com/product/index.html

The result? Google was indexing both versions of the page, and while the page was a PR4, over 5-6 months is lost all PR, rankings dropped through the floor, traffic was a trickle and revenue just sucked.

I even called a few people who have large sites and they too had the same issue. So, what is the solution? It seems clear to me the solution is the same as the non-www protection – force Google to only see one version, not two.

So get your admin to write a rewrite script to force your default page to serve:

http://www.domain.com/folder/

Instead of:

http://www.domain.com/folder/index.html

You should see the page start to slowly gain status back in about 2-3 weeks.