PR and index pages

[dave conz]

I'm working on optimising PR for my home page.

As I understand it, www.mediacollege.com is considered to be a different page to www.mediacollege.com/index.html and each has its own PR. I hear the best plan for homepage links is to use the same form as inbound links from other sites, so you're concentrating PR on one version. Is this right?

So for example, most people link to me as www.mediacollege.com but my internal homepage links are all <a href="/index.html">. Should I change my internal links to <a href="http://www.mediacollege.com"> ?

Out of interest I checked heaps of directories in my site and found that each index page shows the same PR with or without the index.html in the URL. This seems to refute the theory above, or is it just a toolbar peculiarity?

BTW, is www.mediacollege.com considered to be the same page as www.mediacollege.com/ ?

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by dave conz

I'm working on optimising PR for my home page.

As I understand it, www.mediacollege.com is considered to be a different page to www.mediacollege.com/index.html and each has its own PR. I hear the best plan for homepage links is to use the same form as inbound links from other sites, so you're concentrating PR on one version. Is this right?

So for example, most people link to me as www.mediacollege.com but my internal homepage links are all <a href="/index.html">. Should I change my internal links to <a href="http://www.mediacollege.com"> ?

Out of interest I checked heaps of directories in my site and found that each index page shows the same PR with or without the index.html in the URL. This seems to refute the theory above, or is it just a toolbar peculiarity?

Google is smart enough to know it's the same... personally though, I always link internally without the index.html...

Originally Posted by dave conz

BTW, is www.mediacollege.com considered to be the same page as www.mediacollege.com/ ?

Yes.

- Shawn

[I, Brian]

Originally Posted by dave conz

So for example, most people link to me as www.mediacollege.com but my internal homepage links are all <a href="/index.html">. Should I change my internal links to <a href="http://www.mediacollege.com"> ?

Absolutely - this is a very common mistake webmasters make. The URLs absolutely have to be the same.

You must be entirely consistent in your use of URL structure for your site. It’s not simply the /index that comes a cropper with many webmasters, but also the use or not of the www. Prefix.

Once you have a system in place, then keep to it. Otherwise you have split PR and that’s not good.

[PhilC]

Google doesn't see domain.com/ and domain.com/index.html as being the same page, and they often have different PR values. You can see this on many phpBB forums because people naturally link to the forum using the domain name only, but internally, the forum always links to ....../index.php and the PageRank is split between two URLs.

Because of it, I always recommend that the filename 'index.html', or whatever the home page's filename is, doesn't exist for the site owner and should be forgotten about except when modifying the page.

[fishfreek]

For example

http://www.aquariumadvice.com has a pr of 6.

http://www.aquariumadvice.com/portal.php has a pr of 4.

They are the exact same page. I have all (as many as I know of) my insite links going to the .com/ url vs the .com/portal.php url.

http://www.aquariumadvice.com/index.php is a different page than the above to and it has a pr of 5. I use this as an example that google does not default the .com/ and .com/index.php as the same. So you can see three pages all with different PR ratings two of which are the exact same page and one using the index.php filename that is most commonly the anchor page for websites.

[dave conz]

Thanks for the replies. Since I have a number of main directories I should probably do the same to all of them. There is also the issue of changing the index page extension, for example my new forums use an index.shtml at the moment but I'm considering changing to PHP. If I just make the link forums/ instead of forums/index.shtml then I don't have to worry about losing any potential links and PR.

Thanks again.

[dave conz]

Call me paranoid but I really want to double-check this. Someone please just tell me I'm not doing anything stupid - this is really important to me. This will be my navigation at the top of every page in the site. Thanks guys.

[code:1:3f36bbfa27]<a href="http://www.mediacollege.com" class="topnav">Home</a>
<a href="http://www.mediacollege.com/video" class="topnav">Video</a>
<a href="http://www.mediacollege.com/audio" class="topnav">Audio</a>
<a href="http://www.mediacollege.com/graphics" class="topnav">Graphics</a>
<a href="http://www.mediacollege.com/internet" class="topnav">Internet</a>
<a href="http://www.mediacollege.com/glossary" class="topnav">Glossary</a><br>
<a href="http://www.mediacollege.com/forum" class="topnav">Forums</a>
<a href="http://www.mediacollege.com/downloads" class="topnav">Downloads</a>
<a href="http://www.mediacollege.com/equipment" class="topnav">Equipment</a>
<a href="http://www.mediacollege.com/links" class="topnav">Links</a>
<a href="http://www.mediacollege.com/misc" class="topnav">Misc</a>
<a href="http://www.mediacollege.com/store" class="topnav">Store</a>[/code:1:3f36bbfa27]

[PhilC]

You are correct, Dave. If you don't use use the filename of the home page, you can change it to what you want as long as the server will return it when just the domain name is requested.

Your nav links are fine. It's the Home one that you are wondering about, and it's fine - except for one tiny point - put the forward slash after .com. If things still work as they used to work on servers (Apache, anyway), it's necessary. The server gets the browser to add the trailing slash which means that..........well, just add it

[UKZJ007]

a PR of 6 is quite good. What is the highest pr anyone has here?

[PhilC]

I have a PR of 12.5 - it's a Personality Rating - out of 100

[dave conz]

Originally Posted by PhilC

It's the Home one that you are wondering about, and it's fine - except for one tiny point - put the forward slash after .com.

Actually, while I'm on the case I want to get the links to all the categories right. I've noticed that a lot of my Google results don't have the index page (e.g. www.mediacollege.com/video/camera/tutorial/ ). I don't know why this is but I figure I might as well get on board and reinforce that type of URL.

So anyway, I guess I make the links like this with a trailing slash at the end of each URL:
[code:1:f4b4e0b187]<a href="http://www.mediacollege.com/" class="topnav">Home</a>
<a href="http://www.mediacollege.com/video/" class="topnav">Video</a>
etc etc[/code:1:f4b4e0b187]

all good?

[PhilC]

All good.

[dave conz]

Thanks Phil. I give you a Personality Rating of at least 15.5

[PhilC]

Out of 100???? .....<sulk>

[Rob]

Sold to dave conz for 15.5!

[Digiteyes]

Aw Phil, I'd give you at LEAST a 16. :wink:

[Digiteyes]

...very interesting about /index.html

I never knew.. guess I got some work to do.

[Pimpen 2010]

What if I have an internal link that just points to "/" because that technically is www.must-have-software.net with a / at the end, or should I put www.must-have-software.net on every link?

[Digiteyes]

:idea: Now I get it... that's why you do link:www.myurl.com and you get some sites that have every page from inside their site listed. I've been wondering about that.

ok, so maybe I'm a little slow...

[PhilC]

links to "/" are ok because, as you said, it is just the domain. The point about home page filesnames is that they can be called anything and, from the URLs spiders simply don't know which is the home page. index.... is common but you can have an index.html page that is not returned when just the domain URL is requested. It's down to the setting on the server.