Pagerank on landing page but not on index.html?

Something I don't understand about PageRank

[Daithi123]

When I open my homepage using just the domain name (i.e. www.mywidgets.com'), it shows a Pagerank of 2.And if I click on most of the links to pages within my site, they are all at PR2.
However, when I click back to the homepage, and the URL is now www.mywidget.com/index.html, my PageRank drops to zero!
Is this something I should worry about from an SEO PoV? Are there any simple solutions, or even an explanation?

Any thoughts or help appretiated.

Thanks

D

[Bewenched]

You'd better get that default page redirect to www.yourdomain.com/
it's possible to get dinged for duplicate content.

[tedster]

The simple explanation is that Google indexes and assigns Page Rank to URLs, not "pages". And www.example.com is a different URL than www.example.com/index.html. Even though in your case they point ot the same content, there is no technical requirement that they MUST.

So you've got two urls in the Google index that are pointing to the same content -- and they each have their own PageRank. Since PR depends on inbound links, most of your links are apparently coming to www.example.com rather than www.example.com/index.html.

I'd suggest that you edit the links within your site so that they also point to http://www.example.com/ (be sure to include the final slash).

[g1smd]

>> However, when I click back to the homepage, and the URL is now www.mywidget.com/index.html, my PageRank drops to zero! <<

When you click back to your index page, the browser should show http://www.domain.com/ and that is what all your pages should link back to.

You are lucky. Sometimes Google assigns PR to www.domain.com/index.html and then lists just www.domain.com/ in the SERPs as PR0.

You have www.domain.com/ listed in the SERPS, and it has some PR. That is good. Now, link all your internal pages back to that URL (with trailing / too), and that PR will grow a little more. Currently you are sending all your internal PR to /index.html. You need to stop doing that immediately.

By the way, index.html will soon turn into a supplemental result and hang around in the SERPs for another year. That will NOT be a problem just as long as you are not linking to that URL from within your own site.

Optionally you can also set up a 301 redirect to redirect from index.html to just / too. There have been several examples of how to do that in the last few weeks. The question comes up almost every day here.

[Daithi123]

First class explanation folks!

Thank you very much for your help. I have changed the internal link from '"../index.html"' to "../" - and that had resolved it.

Thanks again