I originally asked Vanessa Fox to write a post about this topic, but she got really busy with her recent life changes. Then I asked someone else to do it (sorry, can’t remember who) and they never did it either so . . . I’ll do it!
Search Engine Optimizers love to talk about duplicate content, 301 redirects, .htaccess files, and a million other closely related items; however, I never see posts about one of the simplest things a webmaster can do to consolidate page rank on one of their most important pages.
Don’t link to your home page file, link to your homepage domain!
Here is a real example, and it even uses something that SEOs love to talk about as well…the Google Toolbar Page Rank.
1. If you haven’t installed the Google Toolbar, go do it (and shame on SEOmoz for not having an AdSense button that allows you to do it and they can get $1.00 for each person that does).
2. Now go take a look at the Google Toolbar PageRank for the following two links:
3. Note that the Google Toolbar PageRank for the default page is 5 versus only 4 for the root domain.
Now, you may be thinking, “But TheOneCallGuy, you just told me to link to the domain but it’s got the lower PageRank.” True, indeed it does. But do you know why? Because we have been linking to our default.aspx page for the past 10 years instead of linking to our domain. What has resulted is depressing. We have essentially split our inbound links for our most linked to page in half because about half of the people went to our site first and snagged our URL in the address bar and the other half chose to just link to the OneCall.com address. If we would have only linked to the OneCall.com address, it would have been very difficult for anyone to see the actual file and thus nearly 100% of our inbound links would have been to just http://www.onecall.com.
So, if you haven’t already done it, change all of your default.aspx, index.html, index.php, etc. etc. to just www.blahblahblah.com
There, I got that off my chest. 😉
Brent David Payne
