What would be the best structure for a link to gather PR? Examples of Top Level URL: 1) www. mysite .com 2) www. mysite .com/ 3) www. mysite .com/index.php Examples of Directory URL Links 1) www. mysite .com/example 2) www. mysite .com/example/ 3) www. mysite .com/example/index.php What is the preferred method for a link? There are lot of theories out there but what works best from your experience?
not sure which of the first 2 options is the best, but I would never link directly to /index.php. if people were to type you domain in the address bar, they would never type the full index.php part (and then they wont see the pr in the google toolbar) Also, any natural links wil surely not include it either. Best not to divide your pagerank on basically the same page. whatever you do, just be sure to be consitent.
I never really thought about what you say, but you made me curious too. So I went to Google and made some random searches and took the top results. All of them have a trailing slash after the domain name. I also compared their rankings: the domain name with a trailing shash and the same domain name without a trailing slash. Each time the page rank did not change between the two. So I would suggest that you use the second form, the one with a trailing slash. I think this is what I will also do from now on.
I believe this works the best: www.sitename.com/ www.sitename.com/category/ not with index.php is the url.. You might wanna check this w3, http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html
The rule of thumb is to decide on a format and stick to it throughout your linking campaign. As others have mentioned here, best results are seen with a trailing slash.