URL format can affect your PR?

http://www.widgets.com vs http://www.widgets.com/

[mac_johnson]

I have a site that is about a month old with several different rankings.
[widgets.com...] has a PR0
[widgets.com...] has a PR0
[widgets.com...] is NULL (grey bar)
[widgets.com...] has a PR4

Can anyone explain how this is possible? Google has been acting strange over the past few weeks and that may have something to do with this PR situation. I am not too concerned about this one site because it is just one of many and has a PR4. I am more interested in learning how google treats variations of a URL string.

[jranes]

To the best of my knowledge you should not let the non www url resolve the page because it creates duplicate content for Google to sort through. You could only resolve the non-www url but that seems to be a non standard approach to your outward facing website.

As for the differences between

.com/index.html
.com/
.com

You should probably make all your links in your site that point home point to .com/ only, don't include index.html in the link. Of course .com and .com/index.html may still end up indexed as seperate pages but apparently this can't be filtered out at the present time.

[pageoneresults]

Actually, you should set up a 301 Permanent Redirect...

example.com permanently redirects to www.example.com. This way you need not worry about it. In theory, there can be two totally different sites at example.com and www.example.com.

I've seen many trying to capitalize on this flaw by linking to both the non-www and www versions of the site. I'll find text links where half of the link leads to one version, and the other half leads to the other version. Or, one keyword rich link leads to non-www and another keyword rich link leads to www. How tacky is that?

[jranes]

I've seen many trying to capitalize on this flaw by linking to both the non-www and www versions of the site.

Capitalize? I had no idea that there could be some benefit of this. Don't you think this is more an error of ignorance than capitalizing?

[Harwich]

When I ask people for links I always give them the specific url I want used. I use [mysite.com...]

Where XXX equals a unique abreviation for that site that I then record. This allows me to see (I track it in a DB) where exactly my traffic is coming from? My question, am I just killing myself as far as page rank is concerned by doing this?

Thanks

[taxpod]

IMHO, this is all a waste of time. I have one site where:

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

all have the identical PR, all show the same cached page, and all do fine. So the premise of this thread is not true in this one example. Anyone else have similar experiences?

Try inserting Yahoo or Google for domain, above and while they both redirect to www., the same holds true for "/" and "/index.html"

[lazyz]

Wasn't there also an .info and .biz exploit?

[pageoneresults]

Don't you think this is more an error of ignorance than capitalizing?

For a brief period a few months back, PR was relegated differently to each of the versions. Many topics surfaced as to why PR was lower on the non-www version as opposed to the www version. So, to counteract this, some decided that they would link to both versions and try to balance the PR, twas a mistake on their part.