PR 3 with /index.php and PR 2 without /index.php?

[ashishdabas]

Hi !

I have a website www.my-medicare.com with PR 2. If you open it with index.php in the end i.e. http://www.my-medicare.com/index.php it shows PR 3
or if you click on the 'home' link on homepage or any other pages in the website.

What I want to know is,if I change the 'home' button link from http://www.my-medicare.com/index.php to http://www.my-medicare.com, will www.my-medicare.com get the advantage of increased PR from 2 to 3.

If yes, then how? Should I simply remove the indx.php from 'home' link and link it to www.my-medicare.com?

I can not do 301 redirect because it will make the pages go in an infinite loop and page will not be opened because in the end the page opened is index.php (whether you type www.my-medicare.com or type the whole url with /index.php)

Should I make changes in my robots.txt file or do a ModRewrite redirect? (but will this also make the PR to increase from PR2 to PR3?)

I want every link pointing to homepage should open the page www.my-medicare.com without /index.php.

Pls help me in sorting out this problem!

Thanks
Ashish

[cspelts]

I'd change your own links on your own site to point to just the domain name, but it's not really hurting your site, so I wouldn't go too crazy. Asking everyone who links to your site to update their links may lead to some of them deleting the link instead - and that would definitely hurt your rankings!

[stymiee]

This is basic Google 101. Use a 301 redirect to automatically forward users to one or the other. Here is the code for forwarding them to always have the www:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.|$) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Here is the code to forward them to never have the www:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}//s%{HTTPS} ^www\.(.*)//((s)on|s.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http%3://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Here is the code to make /index.php redirect to /

redirect 301 /index.php /

This goes in an .htaccess file in your root directory.

[frogmanandy]

I tried this piece here and it broke my whole site

Here is the code to make /index.php redirect to /

Code:
redirect 301 /index.php /

and yes if you use redirect 301 /index.php http://www.mysite.com
you will create an infinite loop