In its article It Pays to Link Consistently at Searchenginewatch dot com, Mark Jackson explains that home page and index.html are not the same. For example: on the link 'home' of a webpage, you should place a link www.mydomain.com/ rather than index.html because of links and page rank juice. Do you agree? Can somebody elaborate on this issue? Thanks.
Well don't take my opinion too seriously due to the fact that i'am beginner i also don't know what page rank juice means and I rather get use to question than answer but it seems that Mark Jackson's right. I describe my situation. When you link domain and change index.htm to index.php or any other file your links remain as they were. In the first case, however when you link index.htm they were not because you link specific page so that makes your site less flexible.
This is a problem for a website. The search engines see a link to your index page www.mydomain.com/index.html as a separate URL from this example URL www.mydomain.com. If all your incoming links are pointed to www.mydomain.com and your internal links point to www.mydomain.com/index.html you will have what is called a canonical problem. The link juice from the external links won't make it back to the URL you really want (www.mydomain.com). To correct the problem you should make sure all your internal links point to www.mydomain.com. Or you can redirect your index.html to your root domain. Do some research on website canonical problems and you'll see several solutions.
Hi, Thanks for your answer. I have checked this issue, as it is indeed very new for me. All my pages of my sites are pointing back to the index.htm rather than mydomain.com/ as you suggested. However, looking at the Google webmaster tool, at section 'Pages with internal links', I see that every pages are pointing to the root (mydomain.com/) and not mydomain.com/index.htm. Does that mean I am OK? That my hosting server is by default redirecting to my domain name? Or simply Google has become clever enough to overcome canonical issues ?