different PR for same page - revisited

I know this topic has been addressed before, but I don't know that I've ever seen a conclusive answer about it. My home page has different PR, depending on if you enter it as 'index.php' or 'index.php?' (PR is lower with the question mark). Is this diluting the potential PR for the page? Is half of the PR going to one URL, and half going to the other? If I were to ensure that no links pointed to the home page with a '?', would I see an increase in PR?

The short answer is: Yes!

To a spider, www.domain.com/, domain.com/, www.domain.com/index.html and domain.com/index.html are different urls. Surfers arrive at the site's home page whichever of the urls are used, but spiders see them as individual urls, and it makes a difference when working out the PageRank. It is better to standardize the url you use for the site's home page. Otherwise each url can end up with a different PageRank, whereas all of it should have gone to just one url.

Details here:
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html#tips

Which brings up an interesting question:

How can you gain link popularity if all the inbound links are tagged with a tracking URL? In otherwords, partner A sends traffic to www.mysite.com/index.asp?id=a, whereas partner B links to www.mysite.com/index.asp?id=b, ad infinitum.

If Google sees these as 2 different pages, what would it calculate the link popularity for www.mysite.com/index.asp to be?

Is there a better way to track clickthroughs?

Hmm.

-Nate

nutkeis,

the way to do this is through .htaccess and the Rewrite Engine. You can modify URLs to appear 'straight' to requesting clients.

E.g.

search/item.php&anr=128839?

gets 'straightened' to:

search/item128839.php?

there are lots of thread on this in the archive, and if I get a second, I'll find some for you.

Veddy interestink....

Thank you!