putting PR into one page

[esllou]

I have PR of 6, 5 and 5 on these three pages:

www.site.com/
site.com/
www.site.com/index.shtml

(exactly as listed on Google)

is there a quick and painless way to have all of them going to one "page"...using .htaccess I imagine?

[specter]

No there isn't .You can only provide for inbound links on the url you're interested in.

[HarryM]

It's a common problem. Google is seeing all three as seperate entities.

You need to decide whether you wish your site to be known as www.site.com or site.com. Then put a mod rewrite in htaccess to direct the unwanted one to the wanted one. A search on Webmasterworld will give you the code and lots of discusssion.

You also need to get rid of any explicit references to your index page.

Make sure your internal navigation points to your index page as "/" not "/index.shtml".

Try to ensure all incoming links to your home page are in the format you require, and do not include specific reference to /index.shtml.

It's worth doing, however it can take a long time before Google drops the unwanted urls.

[esllou]

ok, thanks for the replies

[larryhatch]

I did exactly what HarryM suggests, and I believe in it.
I used .htaccess to redirect mysite.net to www.mysite.net
(I think the one WITH the www is better, others will argue its a tossup.)

I went thru every page on my site and made absolutely sure that
each and every internal link did NOT contain /index.html, just the slash.

For those incoming links I had any influence on, friends etc.,
I asked them to do the same. NO index.(whatever), just the slash.

I made all internal links absolute (full address).
That paid off when scrapers copied entire pages as is!

I left all image links relative. That very slightly discourages
hot linking of images, for the amateurs at least.
It also makes it easier to manage and update my pages.

SE rankings and traffic have been slowly slowly improving
ever since. - Larry

[geekay]

I'm doing as Larry does, but would still like to point out that absolute links increase file size somewhat, and is unfortunately easily circumvented by scrapers by erasing the unwanted part of the links e.g. by running a replace command in the scraped html code.

Excuse this off-topic comment.

[esllou]

larry, what line do you have in your .htaccess to direct everything to the www version (which I also agree is better than without)?

[Jim Westergren]

Hi,

Just read this topic which was totally new news for me. I am learning SEO ...

I found that I have a .htaccess on my root dir but it does not contain anything - totally empty.

If I understood correctly it is best to have some lines there that refers all site.com to www.site.com, and so gives all the Google PR to www.site.com, is that right? And what are these lines I put in the .htaccess file?

And did I read correct that I should make all my internal links as they are external on my own domain to give it more PR?

Thanks for answer.

/ Jim