Splitting PR on internal links to homepage?

First I'd like to say thanks to Chris/Aspen for all of the great advice that you give both here and at sitepoint. I've learned more correct info about SEO searching for your posts here and at sitepoint than anywhere else.

I have a vbulletin 3 b7 forum. The main page of the forum is at www.mysite.com/index.php . All external links to my site go to www.mysite.com . Vbulletin, however, seems to be coded in such a way that my internal links to the main page range between

www.mysite.com/
www.mysite.com/index.php
www.mysite.com/index.php?

Google toolbar shows the following PR:

www.mysite.com/ -- PR=5
www.mysite.com/index.php -- PR=4
www.mysite.com/index.php? -- PR=3

Will my pagerank really be split between these 3 URLs for the same page? Would it help my PR to wrestle vB into always linking to www.mysite.com ?

Also, when searching for my target search terms, www.mysite.com/index.php comes up Waaaay above www.mysite.com . When directly typing the URLs into the browser address bar, google toolbar shows the following PR:

www.mysite.com -- PR=5
www.mysite.com/index.php -- PR=4

When clicking on the links in google results, the toolbar shows:
www.mysite.com -- Not currently ranked
www.mysite.com/index.php -- PR=4

www.mysite.com/index.php has NO external links going to it. www.nsuforum.com has only the external link from vbulletin.com's forum listing page.

I know the toolbar can be screwy sometimes, but this has been consistent for the last week. What's going on?

yes it will help to somehow managing to get all links to be the same. stick with your highest one, and try to make all the links consistant to that, because otherwise pr will be split.

Consistency is always good. Google doesn't always split PR though, sometimes they're smart enough to realize it is the same page.

Still -- better safe than sorry.

Thanks guys. I really appreciate the help.

Any ideas on why the toobar shows different PR when I click on a google link to my site and when I type in the exact same URL to my site?

the toolbar can be buggy and unreliable at times -- especially lately.

Yeah, the toolbar always displays different results for me...


Recently "wwwmysite.com" and "mysite.com" displayed the results....

Thanks for that answer. I was experimenting with the exact same thing...

It also depends on what datacentre you get as to what ranking you will get, as the update has started again..espec with the google directory..bout time...

you may click now and you may be polling results from one data centre and click five minutes later to pull results from another.. this seems epecially true at the moment as it has all started moving again and results and rankings are all over the place.