Question about internal linking.

[griego]

Sorry if it was already posted, but i can't find it anywhere.

My question is does it matter if you link to yourself by [mysite.com...] or [mysite.com...]

Does the index.htm make any difference at all?

[korkus2000]

Yes. I linked to index.htm all through one of my sites and it split my PR in google between mysite.com and mysite.com/index.htm. People are more likely to link to mysite.com so you should make sure your links do the same. At some point google will merge the pages as one but I never saw them do that for me.

[stevenha]

This question was asked a couple of weeks ago, and the answer was a fairly definitive "no". But today the answer seems to be "yes". Can this be clarified further?

When I check my pages, mysite.com/content/index.htm has the same PR as mysite.com/content/ , and as long as I can remember (which is not long actually), it's been this way. So I think "no" is the answer to the original question.

Maybe there is some confusion with the "www" prefix issue. I believe that www.site.com and mysite.com are treated separately by Google.

[glengara]

Well I recently changed all links to the home page from index.html to .com, so I'll let you know if I detect any changes.

[korkus2000]

stevenha - I had this problem with 2 sites that I used the page name instead of just the domain. I know that it caused a difference on my sites. When I made the change during the course of 2 updates all of my pages showed as backlinks(which they only showed for www.mysite.com/index.htm) for the domain and I jumped 2 PR points on the toolbar without any new external links. For another site I had a PR4 www.mysite.com and a PR3 www.mysite.com/index.htm which both showed completely different backlinks. Google saw these as 2 completely seperate pages.

Be safe and just link to the domain.

[Jeffry]

And yes, www.mysite.com and mysite.com are definitly treated separately by Google.

[pageoneresults]

Within the past couple of months I've made an effort to remove complete URL paths to directory home pages. Why? Well, I've been toggling between .htm and .asp designed pages and if I provide a direct path to index.htm, that is what is going to get indexed.

If I provide a path like this...

www.example.com/ or www.example.com/sub/

That is what the spider based SE's seem to pick up minus the index.htm. So, if I ever switch over to a .asp home page for the directory, I'm hoping that my link path structure will allow me to make that change and not have to worry about setting up a 301 from the .htm to the .asp version. Are my assumptions correct?