concentrating PR on ONE index page

new site has PR split between three or four!

[esllou]

What I am talking about is having:

[newsite.com...]
[newsite.com...]
[newsite.com...]
[newsite.com...]
64.544.555.77/index.shtml

I have a PR of between 2 and 4 for these five possibilities...using the google toolbar on the third one for backlinks results in "we found no information....etc". If I could concentrate all the potential PR onto just one of these (and it would be the second which I consider a site's "core" URL), my PR would probably be 5, pretty decent for a three-month old site.

But I don't suppose I can do much if external sites link to me in that way. The numerical IP address example at the end is due to ME linking from the guestbook, forum in that way for a few weeks when propogation was happening - and then it slipping my mind to change it later. :-(

What do you guys do?

[mcavic]

First, I'd used mod_rewrite in Apache to make newsite.com/whatever and 64.544.555.77/whatever do a 301 redirect to www.newsite.com/whatever. I think people have said that 301 redirects preserve PR, but I've never been able to tell.

Then, eliminate the index.html from all the links. Internally, anywhere you have href="/index.html" you can just do href="/".

[jomaxx]

Over time Google will recognize that the domains with and without the "www" are identical and will compute backlinks and PR accordingly.

I'm pretty sure that it will do the same with "index.shtml", but not having used a homepage with a .shtml extension, I'm not 100% certain.

I dunno about using the raw IP address, but in this situation it sounds inconsequential.

[jayq]

It seems internal page are getting some up on a lot of index pages right now...not sure why.

[percentages]

>But I don't suppose I can do much if external sites link to me in that way.

IMHO this is a Google bug and you should attempt to get external sites to link to your preferred variation as there is no guaranteed timeline as to when Google will correct this rookie problem.

Asking the linking sites to change may not always work, but not a lot lost in making a kind request ;) Im my experience fellow webmasters/SEO's are very accomodating :)