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PR Anomalies between Domain and Home Page

Different PR being reported

         

BallochBD

9:53 pm on Feb 25, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Whe I log onto my site using [www,mydomain.com...] it reports a PR of 5 but when I go to my home page, i.e. [www,mydomain.com...] it reports PR3. I thought that PR was attached to the home page as opposed to the domain. Any explanations?

rainborick

10:28 pm on Feb 25, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



The reason for the two PageRanks is the URLs your're checking are not the same.

[yoursite.com...] and [yoursite.com...] are indexed separately in Google and so they have different PageRanks. In my admittedly brief and very limited experience, unless the site's main page is named "index.html", "index.htm" or "index.shtml" Google will not automatically cononicalize the URL with the root URL of your site. So, in other words, in all of your internal links, its important to use the root URL "http://www.yoursite.com/" instead of "home.html" when you reference the site's main page. I'd say its important enough that you may want to set up a 301 redirect from home.html to the root URL so Google will begin to merge all of its information on the two records as soon as possible. Otherwise, the googlebot is likely to keep finding "home.html" and keep a separate record for a long time to come.

trillianjedi

10:35 pm on Feb 25, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



http://www.yoursite.com and [yoursite.com...] are indexed separately in Google and so they have different PageRanks.

As far as google is concerned they are two seperate pages.

Google ranks (and calculates PR) by page, not domain.

Think pages with google.

TJ

BallochBD

9:59 am on Mar 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



So what are we saying here? If G sees this as two separate pages they both have identical content and identical links so would it not be the case that the PR would be the same?

Netizen

10:51 am on Mar 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



No, the PR is calculated from links to the particular pages. Obviously you have more and/or higher ranked pages linking to the root domain and fewer linking to home.html

www.domain.com and www.domain.com/home.html are treated as two separate pages and their PR calculated as such.

BallochBD

12:04 pm on Mar 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Thank you. That would explain it.

Netizen

12:15 pm on Mar 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Glad to be of help :-)

holographic

1:47 pm on Mar 2, 2004 (gmt 0)



One thing to remember is that google also sees [domain.com...] and [domain.com...] as seperate pages as well.

At least thats what happened to me. I had different PR values depending on whether the www part was added.

Alan

nanocet

2:11 pm on Mar 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



<<< One thing to remember is that google also sees [domain.com...] and [domain.com...] as seperate pages as well. >>>

Don't forget based upon the / vs. /home.html from BallochBD's original post, these all could be seen as different pages with differing PR even though logically they are the same in this case as they would take you to the same actual content:
www.domain.com/
domain.com/
www.domain.com/home.html
domain.com/home.html

Remember, technically there could be different content for all 4 of these urls.

trillianjedi

2:25 pm on Mar 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Remember, technically there could be different content for all 4 of these urls.

That's the point.

Remember that it's not a case of "google seeing" these as seperate pages, they *are* totally different URL's, it's just that your webserver is serving the same page for all of them.

TJ

BallochBD

2:56 pm on Mar 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I think we are drifting back on the the canonicalization issue here and this has probably been flogged to death over the last two or three weeks.

I understand that these are potentially different websites but for the life of me I cannot think of any circumstances where someone would use them as such or require them to be indexed as such. This would just be asking for trouble.

I know someone will now come along with an example of a situation where just such a thing would perhaps be required but essentially they are always a single site. It would probably be better that the SE robots treated tham as such and let those who does not want this sort it out for themselves. Wouldn't it make more sense to please the majority? I certainly think so. (My 2p :o)

trillianjedi

3:20 pm on Mar 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



This is a webmaster issue, not a search engine issue. It's up to the webmaster to ensure that his server is properly setup.

By the way, it's not sites, it's pages. These are different pages, although they may be from the same site.

TJ

(That said, I don't entirely disagree with your point Balloch.)

BallochBD

7:48 pm on Mar 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



TJ I meant single page and I appreciate that this is a webmaster issue but the majority of people, webmasters if you like, who upload sites to the 'net are not aware of this. (I certainly wasn't until I started to get problems myself :o)