From what I understand you are getting a good deal of incoming traffic from links that perpetuate the old page locations. I would like to see how you are performing the redirect but since I don’t know and would like to get you on the right path as quickly as possible take a look at this: http://www.atlantaanalytics.com/practicing-web-analytics/how-does-google-analytics-handle-301-and-302-redirects/

I appreciate the help. Here’s some more info on the issue of still seeing index.html (as a top page) result in my Google Analytics:

1 ) I double checked my files uploaded via my FTP client and I don’t have any html versions of my pages anymore. I deleted them a long time ago and set up the redirects as a safety net to redirect any old indexed html pages from search engines, and old links from other websites refering to the html versions.
2) I double checked in my Google & Bing Webmaster Tools that my sitemap is up to date with the php versions… and both are.

I wonder if I should use my robots.txt file to scrub out my index.html version from appearing in my Google Anayltics results? I wonder if Google Analytics is just wrong and confussing me with false stats? Please more help.

Why not just delete the index.html page completely? The site will load just fine from index.php and if the php pages are directly linking from their html counterparts on the same domain it doesn’t seem necessary to use this redirect at all.

RewriteRule ^index.html(.*)$ /index.php [L,R=301]

My concern is from seeing my Google Analytics and it shows that my index.html page is the highest visited month after month… still… uuuughhh… why is google still seeing my index.html page??? please shed some light on this.

Each of the following topics have been covered in detail across the internet in many different locations. Our goal is to bring them together under a single roof to demonstrate our building process when developing a website….

Although I already know these items, your writing is superb and the content is amazing.

I’ll definitely have to bookmark this in case I ever forget something while designing a site. Going to subscribe as well