Indexing of widget.com/index.htm versus widget.com/ versus widget.com

Using alt text to increase pagerank, does this make a difference?

[crowthercm]

Hi,

Hopefully I'm goign to be clear enough on what I'm asking as it's quite specific.

Let's say that I want to optimize a hypothetical page (http://www.widgets.com/folder/index.htm) for a given keyword using alt text from incoming external and internal pages. i.e. <a href="http://www.widgets.com/folder/index.htm">Keyword</a>

I'm pretty sure I remember reading that indexing of
widgets.com/folder/index.htm
versus
widgets.com/folder/

makes a difference. Namely, the search engines will index two different pages instead of the same page resulting in a diluted pagerank.

However, does the same hold true if I link to:
widgets.com/folder/
versus
widgets.com/folder

I've written a content manager that automatically generates my internal links and bread crumbs when I add/delete pages. All these pages however finish with widgets.com/folder .

Did all that make sense? :P

Thanks,
Chris

[doc_z]

Hi crowthercm,

normally Google is clever enough to merge identical pages such as 'folder/index.htm' and 'folder/'. However, this doesn't work always. Therefore, it is indeed better to be consistent and just use one type of link.

URLs without a slash are normally redirected (301) to those with a slash. In this case there is no problem.

[crowthercm]

Thanks for the reply doc_z,

I've already gone ahead and fixed my code to be consistent just to be safe.