SEOTipADay.com

One of the most common internal linking problems that I see on sites that are simply dilluting or sometimes even losing the power of their internal linking is when for example they link to an internal page with:

www.widgets.com/blue-widgets

I say this is a problem because not only have you maybe linked to this page maybe so have the other websites as well and then when you do a header check on this url you will see that it is usually a 301 or 302 redirect to the following:

www.widgets.com/blue-widgets/

See the difference? the 2nd one is the one with the trailing slash /. This does make a difference as on most server setup’s this is a 301 redirect from the top link to the bottom link. Yes, all the search engines should be counting 301 redirect links but some take time to do this and this is just a simple discipline that you can use internally to never have to rely on the search engines to value all of your links and fix them for you.

The other problem you can run into is that some setups actually count these as 302 redirects which:

301 Permanent redirects pass page rank/link juice
302 Temporary redirects do NOT pass page rank/link juice

Now, does your website link to internal pages without a trailing / ? Does it do a redirect? Check your header redirects here: http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php