Does google index my index.* page and my folder structure?

Question

I am doing some research on Canonical pages in our site.

Does Google create two indexes in this case:

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

http://www.foo.com/folder/

Or does it only index one of the above?

I am curious if I need to add a rel="canonical" or if I am just overthinking this simple idea.

Answer 1

After research it depends on the web server.

In our case it was a Sun One web server that you could hit both foo.com/ and foo.com/index.jsp

Even though these pulled up the same content, they are two different URLs and Google saw them as two sperate pages with duplicate content. This was bumping down our SEO.

The fix was to modify the web server to auotmatically redirect /index.jsp pages to the /.

So yes, google will index any page that you can browse to in your browser, unless its on you robots.txt or you are manually telling google not to index in some fashion.