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Has anyone any experience of the importance of this?
There's no way for any search engine to know if your default home page is index.htm, index.php, index.asp or anyname.anyextension ;)
It all depends on your server's configuration.
With that in mind, the engine would assume that / and index.htm are 2 different pages with their own PR (it's Page Rank and not Site Rank , keep that in mind)
This is the reason why it is much better to have all the links to / instead of /index.htm, as it avoids distributing PR between 2 pages.
Another advantage is that you may go from a static to dynamic home page (asp,php,cfm...) without the need to ask for an update of all the sites pointing to yours, your backlinks remaining up-to-date.
My 2 cts...
Dan
<edit>corrected typo</edit>
Another good rule of thumb that I had just recently learned is to link back every page to [yourdomain.com...] instead of [yourdomain...] as google sees these as two different pages. It will help to preserve the redistribution of your PR.
I am not really sure that is true. On my site all external links come to www.mydomain.com while all internal links to the home page go to index.html.
When I do link:www.mydomain.com or link:www.mydomain.com/index.html I get exactly the same set of results.
The explanation that I was given a few months ago is that Google initially considers the two URLs to be separate. But then the duplicate pages filter comes in, and it discovers that they are, in fact, identical. So it combines all the links and points them to one, in my case to www.mydomain.com.
