Why would the home page have the lowest PR?

Home page has PR1 and most of the site has PR4

[fmfguy]

I run a site that has ~17,000 URLs. Very few of them are static, but they all have static links. The site is relatively new, we launched about 4 months ago, but I have some decent backlinks and the site is simple to crawl and navigate. For a few months the home page had a PR1 and no other page had any PR at all. Now, since yesterday, the home page still has a PR1 and a lot of the other pages have a PR4. Most of the dynamically generated pages don't have any PR. Why is it that my home page, the page that 99% of the backlinks refer to has a PR1? What is the explanation.

[fmfguy]

Could it be a punishment for not having enough 'deep' links?

[jimbeetle]

I'd first check to see if the content of your home page can be accessed under different URLs:

www.example.com
www.example.com/
www.example.com/index.html

If so, and if external links go different URLs, then the home page PR is being split up among those.

Depending on your server, you can either use mod_rewrite or ISAPI rewrite to correct this.

[fmfguy]

I realized last night what it was and am soooo upset i let this happen!

Some of the links from within my site were pointing to domain.com/index.php and some were pointing to domain.com/index.php?=0, but ONLY the site map was pointing to [domain.com...]

I've corrected this, but will it take until the next PR update before this is fixed? Nooooooooooooooo :(!

[jimbeetle]

So, it looks like you have four URLs that return your home page content. If you linked with at least three variations I assume that external links will also have variations. So the fix remains the same: rewrite three of the URLs so the home page content is returned by only one.

Also, check whether the same content is returned whether using www and non www. If so, you should pick one version and rewrite the other.

Added: If your using Apache see JDMorgan's excellent thread on canonicalization [webmasterworld.com]

[theBear]

And don't forget any parked domains or open IP addresses.