Removing the "/index.html" and having only the trialing slash "/" 
Author: Joe H.
Visited 1307,
Followers 1,
Shared 0
Google looks at "https://www.my_website.com/index.html" differently the "https://www.my_website.com/", even to the point of considering them as two different URLs for the same page which may cause crawlers to treat the same page as different pages, thus affecting the page ranking. They will also cause Web Analytics statistics for this page to be split up.
For example, when I open the website it's always "https://www.my_website.com/" but when I go to another page, then return to my home page, it shows up as "https://www.my_website.com/index.html". So as stated earlier, I have 2 different pages for the same URL. I want to be able to remove the index.html and have only the trailing slash, how can I do this with the software?
Posted on the
You cannot remove the index.html. Normally there has to be either a index.html or a index.php.
You can edit the .htaccess to remove it from the URL - is this what you are asking for?
take a look here: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-remove-html-extension-from-url-of-a-static-page/
I would not recommend to edit the .htaccess for this purpose unless you have a very important need to see something different in the URL.
You do not have 2 different pages for the URL. You only have one index (either html or PHP). The server is normally set up to look for the index even if it is not specified. The Google Crawler knows that.
If you have both a index.html and a index.php then you should delete the not-used.
Author
That's a thought. My site is hosted on a Microsoft-IIS/7.0server, which instead of a .htaccess, it's a web.config. I did find something about regarding always adding a trailing slash to the URL. I was hoping there would be something that the software had that would help. If anyone has another suggestion, it would be helpful.
BTW, any word regarding next-gen formats for photos. That's another thing that Google wants sites to have ( I don't see the point of it).
Do you not set canonical so that Google knows which page to index