Index files

[cookies186]

2 totally different questions here:

Does it benefit your SEO to have your best content under an "index" page?
I understand that a "homepage" of a site would benefit like this but I'm curious about pages that are a couple folders in and not needing to be named "index".

2nd question. How should I handle a blank index file to disallow people from viewing my folder contents. Do I need to setup no follow options in my robot.txt file for them and remove them from a sitemap? Or will google ignore them anyways?