PageRank and inbounds to product.co.com vs. www.co.com/product

Does product.co.com hurt PageRank? I like it for the shortness.

[Eris Discordia]

I posted a dual-topic query on this a while back, but nobody bit on this topic, and I'm being pressed by my boss for an answer.

We make software, and are moving from a horribly unoptimized site to a gradually more optimized one. We have inbound links coming mostly to foo.bar.com at the moment, for two reasons:

1. shortness ("viral marketing"),
2. an URL that stays valid even if the site structure shuffles around.

Meanwhile, the site's internal links (and thus affect on PageRank) are in the form www.co.com/product.

Is the detriment to PageRank severe enough that we should change inbound links to www.co.com/product? Or perhaps change internal links to product.co.com?

Apologies if this has been discussed before. I spent nearly an hour looking for it, but no luck.

Cheers,

Eris D

[BGumble]

Keep it one way or the other across all links, inbound and internal. Since it's easier to change internal and your boss prefers the shorter URL, why not change those?

[albert]

Hi Eris discordia,

BTW - same name in latin and greek? ;-)

I don't understand your question, sorry.

Are you talking about internal links to your homepage?

If so, I guess it's not bad to have them equal to incoming links from other sites.

[Eris Discordia]

albert wrote:

Are you talking about internal links to your homepage?

Nope, links from anywhere within the site to the index page for a given product.

[albert]

So these "index pages for a given product" have backlinks from subpages, right?

If they have also inbound links from other websites it would be nice if the backlinks and the incoming links are equal.

I would recommend to change your backlinks because they are under your control.

<edit> Or do you mean that you have independent sites with index pages for the products? </edit>