Google understanding homepages with PHP gives lower rank

[deaconmpg]

I maintain several sites and update has effected them in a few ways.

Google Rank for 3 of my Sites
(Google seems to treat differnt extensions with different scores)

Homepage "/" vs index.*
________________________________________
Site 1 "/"= PR 6 vs "index.html"= PR 6

Site 2 "/"= PR 5 vs "index.php"= PR 4

Site 1 "/"= PR 5 vs "index.html"= PR 5

So it seems that Google has difficulty understanding an index.php is the same as an index.html?

So My solutions that I can come up with are:
1) dump the php extension from the page if no scripts are running [or]
2) Have all my home links point to the root "/" instead of "index.php"

Thus my question to you folks is how you link to your homepage from internal pages. And/or is this a Google hickup that might get ironed out?

[mike schmitz]

My understanding is that Google rates each unique URL differently. My first hobby website has a PR1 for domain.com and a PR4 for www.domain.com. While someone might know the real truth - I always thought that this disparity was due to some incoming links being domain.com and some being www.domain.com.

mike

[grandpa]

I really can't answer either of your questions, but I can pose another one. If you were to do something like this

RewriteRule ^index.html$ index.php [L]

wouldn't that have the effect of renaming your index to .html, while utilizing the php version? Put another way I don't seem to be losing any value by using php pages, and the example is near to what I do. Maybe there's an answer in there after all...

[bull]

You will have to suppress the
X-Powered-By
header in that case, too, to have a safe solution.

[ThomasB]

deaconmpg, Mike Schmitz has pointed out the answer. Googles PR is handled by page. That's why you see different PR values.
Me, running a few domains, most with PHP powered pages, have never ever seen that the PR wasn't passed with the full value because the linked site uses PHP. But saying that, there might be a difference in ranking, though I don't think that is the case.

[Herenvardo]

I've read somewhere that G treats www.domain.com/ and www.domain.com/index.html as the same URL. This would explain why index.html files seem to not be affected by that.
I don't believe that G penalizes a file only for being .php

Hoping this is useful,
Herenvardö

[g1smd]

Google does treat the URLs as all different and does assign separate PR to each one in the beginning.

You should especially redirect (301) from domain.com to www.domain.com to stop PR being split that way.

You should make all internal links, and all external links, point to www.domain.com/ with a trailing / and without a file name appended.

Google does do a spidering run to "clean up" their "this site is the same as that site, lets combine the PR" database from time to time (like every few months) but if you do things right at your end, right from the start, then you'll naver have to wait for, or rely on, that.