No idea why google is looking for website.com/directory/ rather than /directory/index.htm but I would stick to keeping your internal links to ..ory/index.htm

There was an argument ages ago, that search engines could not totally be sure that www.website.com/directory1/index.htm and www.website.com/directory2/index.htm were on the same site.

There were large hosting companies for example that had :

www.hostingcompany.com/website1/index.htm
and
www.hostingcompany.com/website2/index.htm

which are obviously different sites, though at the same domain.

The issue is that if the SE cannot tell if they are another site they may assign the value of an inward link in error, which would be in your favour.

There was an argument (again ages ago) for what were called all index sites where every page was index.htm .. I had a few sites like that back in the frames days and they did quite well.

It's still happening.. Google is looking for /folder/ and not /folder/index.htm. I can assure you that I haven't linked to /folder/ anywhere and no one has linked to that either. Your opinions please?

I imagine this is a design feature of Googlebot. Forget about it.

I have over 5000 '301 redirects' till now this month. That's over 50% of non-viewed traffic. Isn't that bad?

Be grateful that Google likes your site.

If you're wondering why Google does this, it's probably to help with changes such as index.htm > index.html | index.php | default.html etc.

Yes. But still, I read somewhere that too many redirects in the site isn't good. More over, Google doesn't seem to respect or remember the 301 redirect header. I have been getting requests to the same page (eg: /folder/) over and over again, despite a 301 redirect in place for so long.