Internal link to the home page

[ChristopherGlaeser]

When building menus and other internal links, should the link to the home page be http://www.domain.com/ or http://www.domain.com/index.html or does it matter?

Best,
Christopher

[ChristopherGlaeser]

Thanks! This was causing a major problem. All my pages except my home page had a good page rank. Now I know why. Best, Christopher

[AlanMosley]

Along with Rayns comments, http://www.domain.com is much more presentable but the main reason is canonical issues, http://www.domain.com/ and http://www.domain.com/index.htm are 2 different pages in SE eyes, and any rank awarded to them is split.

One reason home pages rank so well compaired to other pages is internal linking, if you link to every page from the home page, and back again, your websites pagerank is pushed onto the homepage, if you link back to index.htm you waste the pagerank.

for a better explaination read this link, i think any one interested in SEO should read this page

http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html

[RyanKent]

When building menus and other internal links, should the link to the home page be http://www.domain.com/ or http://www.domain.com/index.html or does it matter?

I strongly recommend using the http://www.domain.com link.

It would be best to re-direct traffic from index.html to /. You only wish to present one URL to any web page. The index.html portion of the URL does not add any value to search engines nor users. It simply makes your URL longer and appear less readable.