Question About Page Rank

Page Rank is defferent for www.example.com vs example.com...Any ideas why?

[gchapman]

Hello.

I was wondering why some sites show a different page rank for http://www.example.com vs http://example.com. It seems as though there are 4 possible page combinations for a home page that can all have different page rank. For instance www.example.com, www.example.com/index.html, example.com, and example.com/index.html don't have the same page rank. Could you explain why this is? This is seeming to create a bunch of page rank problems throughout our sites and I am not sure how to fix it. Any help that you could provide would be greatly appreciated! I am at a loss on this one :-)

Thank you sooooo much for your time and help!

[edited by: lawman at 1:59 am (utc) on June 19, 2004]

[Spelunker]

www.example vs example.com

Backward links for each one are different. Google sees it as two different pages.

You might get better PR results if you focus your backward links just to one.

[edited by: lawman at 2:00 am (utc) on June 19, 2004]

[jdMorgan]

The usual solution is to pick one 'standard' domain name, either www.example.com, or just example.com and stick to it in all company documentation, advertising, and Web pages. Ask all associated sites to link only to your standard domain name. Then implement a server-side permanent (301) redirect from all alternate domains to the standard domain.

The "index.html" problem is a bit different. Just make sure all internal pages link to "/" instead of "index.html". There are ways to 'force' this issue, but they depend on what kind of server your site is hosted on.

Searching WebmasterWorld for "domain 301 redirect" should turn up a lot of threads -- many sites have the problems you describe.

Jim

[wellzy]

The "index.html" problem is a bit different. Just make sure all internal pages link to "/" instead of "index.html".

Jim
Not so sure I understand this. Why would it make a difference? When Googlebot crawls your site at www.widgets.com than any sublevel page that links to index.htm should resolve to the www.widgets.com/index.htm, correct? Is this just more of a precaution or is it so sites that pick up links to your site will always have the www in the link (or not have it if you choose)?

wellzy

ps. Definately not saying you're wrong. I'm just trying to understand it.

[gchapman]

Hey Jim.

Are you saying that all of the internal links in the site should be coded <a href="www.domain.com/"> instead of <a href="index.shtml">?

Thanks for your help!

[jdMorgan]

> ... should be coded <a href="www.domain.com/">

That's what I'd recommend, certainly, or just <a href="/">. Look around at some big popular sites -- I doubt you'll see many linking to index.html. Most servers are set up to associate example.com/ with the index file in the root directory. In most cases you can name that file whatever you want, as long as you give the server a directive to tell it what file to serve. On Apache, the directive is DirectoryIndex.

Jim

[jdMorgan]

wellzy,

The problem being discussed here is that of split PR across multiple "alias" URLs. In many cases, www.example.com is an "alias" of example.com, and www.example.com/ is an "alias" of www.example.com/index.html (or .htm or .shtml, etc.). The problem is that although most search engines figure out all these alias names eventually, they often get confused at least temporarily, and give different link popularity or PageRank to some or each of them.

So, the solution is absolute consistency in use of naming conventions on your site. I don't really care what you call your index pages, but usually -- for example, in print or other advertising -- it's a lot easier to say "Visit our site at www.example.com/" and leave it at that, rather than saying "Visit our site at www.example.com/index.shtml ... Please don't forget that ".shtml", folks, because, you see, it's a dynamic site, using server-side includes and our server needs that ".shtml" on the end... Ok, so again folks, that's www.example.com/index.shtml -- Visit today!" (OK, I'm exaggerating, here, but I hope you see the point.

So, this kind of consideration determines the best "public name" for the site's default page is simply "/". Then you set up the server to resolve the URL www.example.com/ to the file "/index.html", and consistently refer to it as "/" throughout the site when linking. This minimizes the chance of search engines getting confused and spreading your PageRank over several different URLs.

Again, it doesn't matter so much what you decide to do, as long as you do it consistently. Use a "www" or non-"www" domain name, call your index page by any name you like, but do it consistently, and use redirects to make it more likely that others will do it consistently as well. However, the big search engines want to call your index page "/" and it's a good idea to cooperate with them...

Jim

[g1smd]

Using links such as www.domain.com/ rather than index.html also allows you to suddenly change your web technology to use, say, ASP or PHP and not require any links to be updated to reflect the new default.asp or index.php filename. It will just work straight out.

There are two things you have to do.
- Don't refer to page names, just the root domain, or the folder name, for sub-folders.
- Redirect all domains to one form using a 301 redirect (NOT a 302).

[wellzy]

Jim

Thanks for the explanation. I see what you mean now.

wellzy