pagerank and redirecting home page

[grifter]

I have a new acquaintance with a hobby site that's been around for a few years. He has set things up so he has a variety of javascript redirects based on where the user came from to get home pages (ppc etc).

I believe his home page is a blank page in the eyes of Google--nothing but javascript on it. His inbound links are to his domain, www.hissite.com, but it seems that some are linked to the resulting urls (www.hissite.com/home.html, www.hissite.com/source17.html). This is probably from users being redirected and using that final URL as a link.

Does a blank home page make the site underperform in Google? Does the PR make its way to subpages on the domain without having to link directly to them, or is the PR wasted? Looking at the "guessed" PR in the toolbar muddies things up.

[mil2k]

Does a blank home page make the site underperform in Google?

I believe yes. Having a little content will help a lot IMHO.

Does the PR make its way to subpages on the domain without having to link directly to them, or is the PR wasted?

The PR is wasted. Should have a link on it to distribute it to other pages.

HTH.

[grifter]

All right, thanks.

Let me take it a big further...would he get the full benefit of PR transfer by just making a simple text link on the blank home page, from www.hissite.com to www.hissite.com/homepage.html (the page users get redirected to by js)?

My instincts say it would be better to make www.hissite.com the home page, and do the reverse for tracking purposes--set up /landing-page1.html, /landing-page2.html and have THOSE redirect to www.hissite.com. Then have the spiders ignore the landing pages via robots.txt. Now, www.hissite.com gets the full PR benefit. But this is a revamp of sorts for him and a big time committment.

I know this is confusing, thanks for your input.

[grifter]

One more piece of info: using link: tools shows www.hissite.com/homepage.html with 1/5 the inbound links as www.hissite.com.