The Problem

About a month ago I realized that clan themes had two different page ranks.  Our link www.clan-themes.co.uk/index.php had a page rank of 3 and our link www.clan-themes.co.uk had a page rank of 4.  It made no sense to me.  It turns out Clan Themes had over 150 links from other pages using the address www.clan-themes.co.uk/index.php.

Its a shame google can't distinguish between the two, but its the truth.  Since www.clan-themes.co.uk/index.php had over 150 inbound links that should be pointing to www.clan-themes.co.uk (my target page).  I had to come up with a fix and do my best to keep it from happening again.

The Fix

Using some simple methods in the .htaccess I was able to fix a few problems.  First I wanted to repair the inbound links to index.php.

Add the following to your .htaccess 

#----Redirect index.php---------------------
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /index.php HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.clan-themes.co.uk/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^http://clan-themes.co.uk$ http://www.clan-themes.co.uk/ [R=301,L]

On the 3rd line you will notice I am redirecting http://clan-themes.co.uk to http://www.clan-themes.co.uk.  Simply put, I want all my inbound links to point to one location for best results.

Why does this solved the problem?

If you were to link to www.clan-themes.co.uk/index.php on your site.  When a Google spider visited your page and finds that link.  It would then try to visit my index.php and be redirected by the .htaccess.  So my new link will be recorded by google as www.clan-themes.co.uk  rather than the index.php link.  Same theory for http://clan-themes.co.uk vs. http://www.clan-themes.co.uk.

Some Notes

I was able to contact most site owners and request a change and I appreciate them for being so generous.
Check google backlinks for www.clan-themes.co.uk/index.php

Test it out www.clan-themes.co.uk/index.php

I hope this was helpful