Google Cache Problem

Cache for 2 different pages is the same.

[Bonus]

Having come across a problem this morning and having not thought of a solution 13 hours later, I thought it was about time to seek advice from those of higher experience than I.

Our homepage is simply a navigation page, where a list of links are provided to each of our affiliate country websites, including the USA.

Now, when accessing our homepage i.e www.abc.com, then our server setting is such that /default.html is displayed. Likewise, the Google cache for www.abc.com is the same.

When clicking on the USA link, then you are taken to a different page, www.abc.com/index.html

However, for the above /index.html page, Google's cache is not showing what is actually displayed on that page. Instead it is showing the exact same cache as that on www.abc.com. Maybe I missed some fundamental principle here? There is no cache for www.abc.com/default.html.

PR is 6 for both the mentioned pages, assumably because it is 'seen' as being the same page.

I assume then that Google is also not following the links from /index.html... this is my real problem.

PR on links from the page fall like a lead balloon, down 2 notches at least, some more.

Anyone seen this or have any ideas to solve it?

[bird]

There is an old tradition in web servers that the root directory / displays one of /index.html, /default.html, or /home.html (there may be other variations that I can't remember right now). It is quite a rational assumption by Google that links to any of those are actually pointing to the same content.

If seperate caching in Google is important to you, then you could rename the index of your US specific subsite to eg. /us_index.html. On the other hand, you could just be happy that Google throws the incoming links to both pages together, which in sum probably results in a better PageRank than either of them would get if they were counted seperately.

Hmmm... could we file that as an under-appreciated method of PageRank optimization? ;)