Forum Moderators: open
I'm trying to determine the PR for other sites in the top 10 for my desired search terms. When I go to their home page many show a grey page rank. However, when I specify the index.html page (www.domain.com/index.html) I see that they have good page rank.
I'm wondering which page rank I should use when weighing the competitiveness of these sites, the one for www.domain.com/ or www.domain.com/index.html?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
-Damon
To Google, / and /index.html are two different pages (because it's very possible to have / and /index.html to actually be two different pages on a server).
I would look at what is being linked to more - / or /index.html. It sounds like /index.html is linked to more frequently, so that's what I would use.
Many of the results which appear in the top ten are for root-level urls like "http://www.domain.com/". When I click on these urls they often have no PR, but the /index.html page does. I'm thinking that Google is ranking them highly because of the PR of the /index.html page and that I should use this when figuring my average PR. Does this sound correct?
-Damon
Does this sound correct?
It depends on what page Google is returning for your query. If Google is returning / instead of /index.html, you should be focused on /. And vice-versa.
But, I think you're paying too much attention to PageRank here. Check out some of the off page factors. Check out allintitle, allinanchor, and allinurl. Check out the H1 tag of the ranking pages. Check backlinks. Check out text on the page. Those are some verifiable things you can check out.
An average PageRank of the top ten won't tell you much, because it's quite possible for a lower PR page to trump a higher page in the SERPs.
