link popularity - assigned to page or domain?

[xxxjay]

Here's a good question - is link populaity to your site assigned to the domain or per page.
Example: Does www.yourdomain.com have the same link popularity as www.yourdomain.com/main.html?

Most links would point at the index and less or none to the main. So, if you are trying to get hits to www.yourdomain.com/main.html for certian keywords will you get penalized because of the lack of links?

I've also heard the certian search engines (Altavista) favor root domains. Any thoughts on that?

[paynt]

Hello xxxjay, the way I see it is the root domain, with the www, probably gets the most incoming links, unless you are maintaining a very vigorous theme linking campaign. It’s probably going to be the strongest page in your site out of sheer numbers. You can encourage the other pages of the site to receive incoming links, if you look for the right sources of link partnering, not to mention submitting to vortals.

My gut tells me that the stronger each string of the web is, the stronger the site as a whole becomes. I think it’s better to have shorter, tighter, strings and more of them, twinning together than longer weakened strings.

[xxxjay]

Thanks paynt. That's what I figured. Problem I'm having is I have a client that insists on using a genic type index page for his domains. This page is not SE friendly at all. He wants me to get the hits to subpages and doorway pages, where it makes the most sense to me to pull out all the stops on optimizing the index - but I can't do that. It's kind of a handicap, I think, but you know the old adage - "The customer is always right." It's just frustrating. I am tempted to cloak the index with relavent terms, but I'm not convinced that that is a good idea (especially if the pages got banned).anyone else had this problem?

[2_much]

...so when calculating the ranking of a page, does the engine count links pointing directly to the particular page, or does it also count links pointing to other pages within the domain???

so if you have the index which has X links pointing directly to it..then you have Y links pointing to subpage 1, Z to subpage 2, etc.

When ranking a page, does the engine add X + Y + Z ? or maybe it gives more points to the # of links pointing to the page it is ranking, but also links pointing to each other page are accounted for but with less weight?

someone please help me out on this one!

[DaveAtIFG]

xxxjay - I'm with you! For smaller sites, optimize the index and the subpages give a linking boost and a theme boost. Perhaps the admonition about duplicate content being banned could be stretched to this common index page? If the client's issue is one of branding, a common logo or graphic could be included on each index page.

2_M - I think everyone would KILL for this much detail about how the SEs work! I expect that level of detail is going to be limited to employees. And it's gonna vary from engine to engine. Someone may have reverse engineered one or two of the engines to this level but I'd be surprised!