PHP Homepage and Page Rank

I need some help - this is weird!

[jady]

We have a Client's website that was done with PHP and HTML pages. Unfortunately the only way we could go was a PHP index page. (index.php)

We have done some really good link exchanges with this newly launched website. The link exchanges are posted as [blahblahblah.com...] WITHOUT the /index.php at the end of it.

Weird thing is, when you visit the website by just using the url (again without the /index.php) you get a "white" page rank bar. When you type the /index.php after it, you get a page rank of 4. Also cant view cache when just using the url, but it does view a cache if you use the /index.php.

Any PHP experts/Marketing experts please give your advise! Is there something I need to do server side? Thanks in advance!

[jatar_k]

There are absolutely no issues with having a .php index page.

It almost sounds like you have an old .html, or other extension, page there. Do you have multiple index.* in the root folder?

If you do look for which extension it will serve first or remove all of them except the php one and see if that makes a difference. It sounds very strange but it could be something simple like that.

It strikes me as strange that the toolbar would think /index.php and / are different.

[mat]

To 'force' the index.php page to be served up as default when someone types in just www.domain.com, you'll need the following in your root .htaccess file ...

DirectoryIndex index.php

Mat

[mat]

... and, if the site originally had an index.html file, you might also want to add this ...

RewriteRule ^index\.html$ index.php

Mat

[ruserious]

I have noticed a similar thing.

Our domain has a higher PR than our domain/index.php page. The index.php is served as default by the webserver and we do not have/had any other index.sth.else files there.

index.php is weighed just as any other subpage that you can reach from that index. I don't know if this has anything to do with the .php extension though, or if this happens with .htm(l) sites as well.

[jady]

Thanks Mat - we never had a html index page so I created a .htaccess that says "DirectoryIndex index.php". Should this correct the problem immediately or once Google (and others) crawl the web and put a new index up?

Appreciate the help!

[jaski]

Weird thing is, when you visit the website by just using the url (again without the /index.php) you get a "white" page rank bar.

I think most replies so far assumed that its a "white" page and what Jady actually was saying was a white pagerank bar.

Jady do you get same page in the browser when you type www.yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com/index.php?

If that is true then it looks like a discrepancy on google's part and you cannot do any thing to correct that, should correct itself automatically on next google update.

On the other hand if you get different page for above mentioned urls then you could use some of the remedies posted in previous posts.

Jaski

[jady]

Jaski - I do get the same page when you type in index.php or just use the URL. Checked the server side files and there is no htm or html (or any other index) files.

Lets see what happens on this update - your probably right though..

Thanks!

[jamesyap]

I have read a few articles related to this problem.

Google will see

[yoursite.com...]

totally different page as

[yoursite.com...]

! REMEMBER THIS!

even [yoursite.com...] is different from the above 2.

You must make sure you stick to one of them when you exchange link with others.

If you have link exchange with others using [yoursite.com...] but [yoursite.com...] has higher page rank, what I guess is that you interlink pages in your site with the index.php version. If this is the case, change all the link to /index.php to simple a "/" (slash) or specify your whole domain without the index.php will definitely create a better page rank on the next google bot crawl.

Hope this help you.

-- James Yap --

[edited by: Marcia at 9:04 pm (utc) on Nov. 30, 2002]
[edit reason] no sig URLs, please [/edit]