Home Page URL without "/index.html"

Question

Is there a way to change the Home Page URL of a MUSE website so that "/index.html" does not appear after the .com?
I'm concerned that Google will interpret our home page as a duplicate page.
Thanks for your help in advance!

Answer 1

In terms of getting friendly URLs, there are many server side ways to do this. Most servers on the web are Apache, and, if you feel brave, you can read up on .htaccess files to do redirects to more friendly URLs. They are complicated, and not for the coding faint of heart, so be careful. Note, though, that URLs created by Muse cannot take advantage of these friendly URLs automatically, and links would need to be manually pointed to the right place through the hyperlinks drop down.
However, let's talk about the root fear here: SEO. Having index.html on the links is not known to have any negative impact on your site's SEO. There is no official source from either Google or Microsoft on the topic that states anything solid on the topic. Both do have information regarding duplicate content, and Google comes the closest to actually making a comment by stating that links should be consistent. When using Muse's page linking functionality, we will output all links to be consistent everywhere in your site, and as such, will comply with Google's SEO guidelines in this regard.
In regards to duplicate content, the filename index.html is a special filename for websites and webservers and is the default page name on most servers. Servers with server-side languages and with other configurations like the one I mentioned above can have different names, but this is the most common by far. Without extra configuration, your server will serve both index.html and / as the same page regardless of wether or not it is a Muse site. Google and Bing, in our experience, are smart enough to merge the two files without any trouble, but the proof is in the pudding, as they say. There is a simple test you can use to check and make sure they are doing the proper thing. If you would like to verify that there are not duplicate results in the search, simply go to Google or Bing and search for "site:http://www.mydomain.com Home" without quotes. Just replace your domain name in there, and search for your homepage title, and you should see your homepage listed. In every Muse site I checked (just pulling ones at random form the site of the day) there was only 1 listing for the homepage, indicating there was no confusion by the search engines. If you'd like to clarify or check things further, you can always use Google's WebMaster Tools to take additional actions in informing Google about your site.
We care about the SEO of your sites and do our best to ensure that things we can do automatically, we try and cover for you. We are always making improvements in every area of our code, and this is one area in particular we know you all are passionate about. Unfortunately, the area of SEO has a lot of misinformation, misunderstandings, and unknowns that spread very quickly and will get adopted without a real understanding. In addition to doing our best to comply to good SEO practices, we also do our best to make sure we're not filling your sites with false remedies and cheap tricks that don't quite work. When we look at new features, we think about their impact on your sites, on SEO, and on what we can do to improve both your and your website visitor's experience. For example, when we added mobile and tablet layouts, we also added canonical and alternate meta tags to your pages so that search engines knew about the duplicate content, and also knew where and when to redirect users. And as new things come out, we'll continue to do our best to have the same amount of due diligence in ensuring you rank as high as possible for your searches. And we'll continue to examine areas where we could use improvement, and do our best to make them whenever we can.
Hopefully that clears things up a bit.
Andrew Hushbeck
Muse QE