The idea of this article and this small research attended me on recollecting one site( let’s call it experimentalsite.com). What interesting was about the site is that its home page had different Google Page Rank when opened as experimentalsite.com and experimentalsite.com/default.asp.
Of course I knew that Search Engine Spiders see those pages as different ones but this time my Tool Bar gave me very persuasive visual confirmation of that fact. The page experimentalsite.com had PR5 and page the experimentalsite.com/default.asp PR3. So the other time you’ll be achieving links form your link partner make sure that you’re linked to the right page.
VS 
So I decided to check if Search Engines find the pages as different and what is a link popularity of each of those “multiple” pages. I only put the different variations of the page URL to Link Checking Tool and got the following:
| URL/Engine |
|
MSN |
Yahoo! |
| www.experimentalsite.com |
222 |
1302 |
1940 |
| www.experimentalsite.com/default.asp |
0 |
1 |
1620 |
| experimentalsite.com |
222 |
1313 |
88 |
| experimentalsite.com/default.asp |
0 |
1 |
88 |
What do we see from here? Google makes no difference whether you put www before your domain name or not. It treats both pages equally. The same tends to do MSN. But Yahoo give much less weight tot pages without antecedent www. In its turn Msn and Google appear not to rate /default.asp pages and you can hardly count links assigned to those pages.
However there is nothing to worry about as a situation with Page Rank Leakage is controllable on your end( read on the end of your webmaster).
Theoretically if Search Engine considers the same page of your site accessed in different ways to be different pages with duplicate content the site might trigger duplicate content penalties. I wonder if anybody has ever been penalized for that by search engine. Any ideas?
One Response to “Stop Page Rank Leak from your Home Page”
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June 30th, 2006 at 2:30 pm
Actually, Google is now punishing for this since the release of Big Daddy (see Matt Cutt’s blog) - the solution is to provide a permanent redirect for all of the URLs except the chosen one (usually your “www” URL) - Cheers!