PageRank difference between /index.php and /

What causes it?

[davestanton]

Hi

i have a site at <snip>

my problems is when someone first visitas the site on <snip>/ i get page rank of 3. but if i put in <snip>/index.php i get page rank of 4. anyone got any ideas how i can get the /index.php to be the default on loading so i get the PR4
thanks
dave

[edited by: trillianjedi at 11:35 am (utc) on April 7, 2006]
[edit reason] Please see TOS #13 [/edit]

[g1smd]

I would link only to "/" both internally on the site and externally, and then set up a 301 redirect from "/index.php" to "/" as the long term solution.

PR will eventually combine.

[Dugger]

I think Google is having a problem right now. I have a site that had ranked well in Google for a long time and recently dropped right out of site. On examination I found that "/" is no longer in the search index and there is no cache of the page. "/index.html" is in the search index and does have a cache but the page can't be found for keyword searches.

All of my other sites still resolve correctly for "/" or "/index.html"

I expect that once Google re-learns that "/" and "/index.html" are actually the same my rankings will return.

[g1smd]

I see some sites where:

domain.com/
www.domain.com/
domain.com/index.html
www.domain.com/index.html

are all listed, but some have older cache dates, or are supplemental.

If they are confused at the root level, who knows what effect that can have as you go deeper into the site...

[Halfdeck]

I expect that once Google re-learns that "/" and "/index.html" are actually the same my rankings will return.

According to Matt Cutts (See SEO advice: url canonicalization), Google considers / and /index.html to be different urls.

[Dugger]

I assumed that google new they were the same since when you search Google using the url "/" it will return "/index.html" - for my sites anyways.

[optimist]

You need to be careful using relative links. Google may see it as duplicate content despite the fact than most designers and most dynamic "out of the box" applications use /index.extension, this is actually bad in Google.

Change all those paths to be an absolute URL link to your home page using http:// + domain.com don't forget the trailing slash or you'll cause a redirect to the / (trailing slash). This can cause a page to go supplemental, even linking to a directory like domain.com/directory should be domain.com/directory/ or Google will get lost. I tried these on a redirect tester and saw there is actually a redirect that shows if you do not code these properly.

Google is pretty archaic in the way it handles redirects.

But apparently any redirect of any kind is no longer a good idea especially in Google. Any Redirect = BAD.

[tedster]

I would agree that any redirect of the "bare" domain name can bring trouble. Serving a page directly for any request of "just the domain" is a best practice. Index pages, whether for the domain or for a subdirectory, are best linked to by ending the href at the final slash.

[g1smd]

If you link to just www.domain.com/folder/ then you can change that index page from being index.html to instead be index.php or default.asp or whatever.newtechnology at any time, without having to change any links on any of your (or anyone elses) pages. That is good for visitors, for site stability, and for PR too.

[abacuss]

I think a 301 redirection would be helpful. As earlier said..

domain.com/
www.domain.com/
domain.com/index.html
www.domain.com/index.html

all these url's would lead to the same content.. but google may treat them as different pages thus the question of different page rank or supplemental results.

[g1smd]

A few months ago, in experimenting with a 301 redirect on a site that had been previously indexed as both www and non-www, I set up the redirect to point to the version with the most number of pages indexed (in this case, the www version).

I now see that the root index page is listed under several variations of / or filename, and that all the www versions are URL-only or are supplemental, and all the non-www versions are shown as fully indexed.

I am wondering if, for this site, I made a mistake: perhaps I should have chosen the version (www vs. non-www) with the best listed index page (non-www), rather than the version with the most indexed URLs (www) instead, as being the target of the redirect?

Normally, those two criteria (best listed index page, and most number of pages indexed) would lead to the same choice of (www vs. non-www) version, but for this one site it did not.

Did I make the wrong choice?

I am not going to change anything now, as I believe that Google will eventually get it right.

Which one of the two criteria do you rate as the more important of the two (if they conflict), when making this decision as to which URL to be redirected?