Index Page PR different than homepage

I understand what everyone says about PR being useless, but when those above you look at it as a measure of success, it becomes important, so please humor/help me.

My problem is that in looking at the PR on my homepage this morning, it is a 3, but the /index page (essentially the same page) has a rank of 6 (which is where both have been for about a ear-plus now. How can I get google to recognize that these are one and the same page? All of the data is identical, so I am also worried that I will get penalized for duplicate content. Any suggestions?

Thanks

If you could explain what you mean by "home page" (as opposed to index page) that would help...
Do you mean the domain root? If so - you can (301) redirect the "index.html" page to the domain root, to "consolidate" your PR.
(BTW - If you mean the site in your sig' I see a PR3 for the domain root and the index.html)

If you are on apache you can use this redirect:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]

I would define homepage as what is typed in directly to get to my site. If you want to see the issue for yourself, click the first link in my signature. That is the homepage, but if you add "/index.cfm" to the end, it is the same page but the page rank is different.

Ahhh...
Now I see a PR3 for the domain root and PR6 for index.cfm!
Part of the problem is that you have many internal links aimed at "domain/index.cfm", it's always a good idea to just aim them at the domain root... However you can overcome it with the redirect (but should adjust for .cfm) try this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.cfm\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.cfm$ /$1 [R=301,L]

You can test it works after uploading by trying to access domain/index.cfm... you should be redirected to domain/

BTW... When I typed in domain/index.html I get a page which says "We are currently performing system wide maintenance..." and redirects (via meta-refresh) to the domain root!
The page has PR3 so I guess Google have indexed it. I don't fully understand why it's there but I would recommend 301 redirecting it to the domain root.